“Throughout the Gospel, Mark has warned that signs, miracles, and portents do not evoke faith… Along with early Christianity as a whole, Mark is interested in faith in the resurrected Jesus, not in proofs of his existence. It is an encounter with the resurrected Lord, not the empty tomb, that produces faith.” (Edwards, The Gospel of Mark)

I was commenting on a thread from a friend recently, which was posing a question regarding the reliablity of the Gospel accounts, particularly regarding the resurrection. This led me to recover this quote above from one of my commentaries on Mark, a Gospel which was cited in this thread as not only the earliest of the canonized compositons, but as one which percievably doesn’t cite encounters with the resurrected Jesus. Setting aside the later addition of the extended ending, the Gospel famously ends at the empty tomb, with the command of the angel to “go tell” leading the women to flee the tomb in terror and amazement, “saying nothing to anyone.” (16:8) Something many a scholar and sermon has weighed in on in over the years with stated reflections on the ambiguity of it all, evoking thoughts that span the spectrum from poetic and astute to disconcerting and incomplete.

As I’ve been reading through this quote again, and thinking through the aformentioned thread, I was struck by the following observations:

The apparent intentionality by which the empty tomb, if read in light of Mark’s literary structuring of the Gospel as a whole, arrives not as the focal point of the narrative but rather becomes the means by which the author brings the larger and overarching concerns of his writing to the surface in a climatic and pointed fashion. As the commentary by Edwards suggests, a significant part of this can be seen as the constant movement in the Gospel between unbelief and belief (or more accurately, seeing and not seeing), consistently positioning both within the growing tension of these counter-intuitive expectations. This is something the citation above is capturing in Edward’s assessment that, for Mark, signs (or proofs) will never convince, only an encounter can.

But there is an important addition to this point that needs to be said. Here, the author of Mark’s Gospel would not have our appeal to modern empiricism in mind. This is not the language of the ANE. For the ancients, and for Mark’s audience (and the author), that the world is filled with signs and miracles would be assumed. This is the shape of the world they both observe and experience and also inhabit. This is important, because for the author and the audience, the concern here was not for seeking modern proof texts of the gods existence, but rather for how Jesus fit into the equation in a world full of gods.

For modernists, and in-particular those of us occypying the narrative of the West, the empiricism of our day is asking a very different question with a very different set of concerns, beginning with the fact that it assumes a contrasting starting point when it comes to the shape of the world. This matters because, this is precisely how and why modern objections to the legimacy of the resurrection tend to also evoke a redefintion of the word “faith.” Here, faith becomes a word that juxtaposes the claims of the Gospel over and against our modern demands for a kind of science and a kind of history that fits with our present and culturally constructed conceptions of knowledge or truth. Unlike the Gospel of Mark, the concern is not for how Jesus fits into the equation (the modernist will happily pull Jesus the crucified “moral teacher” out of the equation), but for how we accept a world filled with signs and wonders. In truth, the modernist assumption assumes the resurrected Jesus does not and cannot fit in the equation at all as it’s default position, forcing the text to bend to our own demands rather than seeing what the text is saying to it’s original readers. It is on that level that the modernist can then say, because the text does not appear to be satisfying our demand and answering our questions, it must be (fill in the blank). 

Set within that ANE context, faith did not accord with modern usages which evoke a kind of belief in something without evidence. Why does this matter? Because when one pulls something like the Gopsel of Mark out of it’s world and forces it to bend to our modern expectations and conceptions, things gets confused and misconstrued, and, in my opinion, what gets missed is this most important question concerning Jesus for our modern questions and demands- why this Gospel would have been compelling  and necessary to the context of it’s original readers in the first place (which it undoubtedly was).

Recovering that question is precisely the in-road into why, again in my opinion, the presence of this resurrection story in the pages of history is or should be compelling to modern readers on objective grounds. Faith in the ancient sense is not belief without evidence. The assumption that this evidenced witness exists is the very reason why we find this discussion about the empty tomb in the Gospel of Mark preserved at all. Rather, faith here, in it’s proper contextualized understanding, is a participatory word. It evokes allegaince to a conviction regarding what one is compelled towards in light of what they have observed and experienced. It concerns their interpretation of the crucified and risen Christ, not their struggling with the concept of a resurrection. Faith, in this sense, is a word birthed from the social contracts of their day, bound as it is between two things set in a particular relationship to one another- in this case the relationship being that which exists between Mark’s audience and the Jesus that has entered into their story and is informing their (Jewish) expectations. 

It’s important to note here that, if this is correct, and if the narrative in the Gospel of Mark is constructed around an obvious and pre-existing conviction in the resurrected reality of a resurrected Jesus, and if it is correct, as I would argue along with numerous scholars, that this is the only way to make sense of Mark’s literary work on a thematic level, then such efforts to force the Gospel, as certain circles of modern scholarship are want to do, to adhere to modern demands for certain empirical approaches, are actually not acting (or their argument is not acting) in good faith.

What should be of interest here, or the questions we should be asking, is, if it is clear that the Gospel according to Mark is written to a historical community formed around these Jewish expectations in the 60’s, and if the logical implications of the existing Gospel is the pre-existing story of the resurrected Christ which they are already aware of and are already living in and with, both of which I think are fair assessments on reasoned and logical grounds, this means two things- this credal awareness is not bound to or emerging with the Gospel of Mark, and this credal awareness is expressley rooted in an active conviction (faith) in the resurrection for a reason. Otherwise, to put it simply, the conversation the Gospel represents between author and audience does not make logical sense.

Thus we are burdened as modern readers to ask why and how this is the case in those same terms. To use our own modern expectations to force this scenario to reflect what is commonly reflected in certain polemics as a community somehow uninterested in or unable to distinguish between true and false experience, or proper and improper evidence, is only setting us at a distance from the necessary and rational and logical questions.

There is another point to be made here too. If it is true that Mark’s Gospel has a particular narrative structure and form, one that is almost certainly borrowing from recognized and common ancient biographies among other forms and devices, the logical conclusion is that the author is accentuating and using these narrative devices and literary constructions to say something specific to his audience and their context. Thus, to understand how these specific literary devices and emphasis and themes are being used not only roots us in a world grappling with that pre-existing witness, but connects it to what the author sees as “their own” relative modern concerns.

Which is to say, just because the text has a literary form does not evoke the logical conclusion of invention in and of itself. Just because it is borrowing from ancient biography does not evoke the logical conclusion that this literary form is bringing to light a Jesus that is somehow being co-opted out of the historical presence of a “moral teacher” and reformatted as a resurrected divine figure by later editors. There is in fact little to no evidence that such a conclusion would be warranted.

The audience, as would be true for such writings, are being placed within the narrative. They are being asked to see themselves and their own story within the story of Israel and the story of Jesus, and largely in ways that, if we are to read the Gospel at face value, assume these readers understand the hyperlinks and the allusions and common witness evidenced in the text itself.

Which is to say, the Gospel only matters if a resurrected Jesus mattered to it’s audience first.

This is made abundantly clear by the Gospel’s opening line- “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Which, not inconsequentially, is the very thing that should awaken us as modern readers to what Mark’s literary structure is ultimately bringing to light with it’s ending.

We can say the same thing about Paul’s writings as well, where Paul is writing to and engaging with a people in the late 40’s and 50’s regarding a story they already know and are living within. Paul’s writings assume that his readers know all of these extant details which are lingering in the background of what Paul does say regarding his particular concerns for the ever changing context of these communities he crosses in his travels, informing the what and why of his concerns.

Which is to say, his letter’s don’t make sense unless there is a pre-existing conviction and witness at play in the lives of these communities, and for that matter a witness that logically places us in the very imagination of the eye witnesses that Paul would have existed in proximity to, something we see being referenced all over the place in these writings.

Thus, as those of us studying his works today, those are the questions we have to ask in our own cross-cultural movement and ensuing process of contextualization.

If one wants to make the argument that there was no pre-existing conviction regarding the resurrection, someting common modern polemics against Christianity often simply assume on their way to some shape or form of an argument for invention, the burden is placed on such an argument to justify how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of this composition history. how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of a world, both in it’s hellenized and, even more importantly and compellingly, Jewish context, which arrives for the audience of these writings with an established credal presence.

And not just an established one, but one that they take with the utmost seriousness. This might be a world somewhat lost to us today when it comes to manuscripts, as would and should be expected, but the most serious scholars understand that this doesn’t (or to use the more aggressive word- cannot) preclude us from asking what the logical implications are regarding what we do have, the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s writings being amongst that. This becomes especially prudent when we consider how smartly structured Mark’s Gospel actually is on a literary level. It should go without saying, but unforunately it needs to be said more often than not, but the text knows the difference between literary form and invention.

This conversation doesn’t simply end here however. Both the fact that the Gospel of Mark seems to be pushing us to consider that knowledge of the resurrected Jesus comes through encountering the resurrected Jesus, thus shaping the way we see and know the world as faithful (lived conviction) participants in this story, along with the fact that, as with much of our reasoned arguments, we are always dealing with the category of logical implications, point to this simple idea- who Jesus is and why Jesus matters in relationship to the resurrection witness sets such encounters with the resurrected Jesus within the bigger questions that our lived reality bear out in response. As modern readers, this forces us to contend with how our own worldviews, the narratives we are participating in and the realties we are encountering, make sense of the world we observe and experience today.

Here my mind is shifting back to a book I am presently reading called Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologican, by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman. In many ways, the questions they are wrestling with wonder about how it is we find Jesus today in a world that no longer makes space for the possiblity of the narrative form we find in Mark speaking to something true. At best we have empty metaphors that we apply to our materialist interpretations. At worst, we have the intentional underwriting of a Jesus we have remade in our own modernist image. The problem being, neither of those things seriously contend with what the Gospels are. Such an encounter is, in many ways, made and deemed irrelevant and impossible.

Perhaps then, the most pertinent thing for such discussions in the modern sphere is that aforementioned question of and concern for the logical implications of a given worldview or belief. Have we in fact attended for the logical implications of the worldview driving our modernist readings and approaches? In what is essentially an ongoing conversation between Volf and Wiman, this is, I think, what is ultimatley being wrestled with on their way to the bigger questions (or, as it is stated at one point, the biggest question- is our reality shaped by God or not).

I really resonated with this observation from Wiman to this end:

“It’s not easy to love reality. I’m certain I have never managed it. Why would the chief injunction of our lives be so nearly impossible? Who is Jesus for me (then)? He is the one who makes suffering sacred, the one who harmonizes love and action, the one who makes it possible to love God…. If we understand God as love, the problem of how to love God is not clarified by simply swapping the terms. We’re not released from the objectlessness of God… Perhaps (then) we are meant to love reality.”

Volf adds this poignant observation to the mix in response:

“Modernity: the realization of freedom from. The necessary new era: the call of what freedom is for…. Freedom is both spiritual autonomy with regard to God and humble servitude with regard to humanity. It’s appallingly simple- but so very difficult to live out.”

Freedom from or freedom for. Two different questions with their own implications for how we see the world. In Volf’s view, the implication of a modern world that has built itself on the assumption of freedom from (the chains of history and the past), has in fact clouded the fact that we have lost the ability, and even in some cases the presumed interest, in asking what this freedom is for, if anything. To what end are we to live and why must we live so, are not the questions that the myth of progress are asking. Where in this world do we find the kind of authority that can freely make sense of the ways in which we do in fact live. For both Volf and Wiman, there is much to consider regarding the implications of a god-less world on this front-

“If God were not the God of all, God would dissipate for us all into “divine individuals” and each of them drawn into our fraught relations with one another… This transmutation of God to will to power is in the logic of God being the God of a particular without at the same time being the God of the whole world.” (Volf)

That’s a quote I’ve been reading and re-reading for a bit. Sitting with. In many ways this is why I find power in encountering the narrative of Mark’s Gospel in it’s world, as I have been over the past while. However much it flies against the modernist assumptions and worldview that I have been handed, there is something for me in it’s narrative of resurrection, in it’s story of new creation coming in Jesus amidst it’s liberating from the enslaving “Powers” that awakens something in me regarding how it is that I actually experience the forces of Death and Life in this world. It gives a proper name to that which I know to be intuitively true about how this world works. More than this, it gives me a logical basis for understanding the true shape of this world, unlike what my modernist treaties taught me, for making sense of a world seemingly shaped by this universal witness to a reality that that is not reducible to it’s materialist and utilitarian functions.

I am struck by something I came across in my commentary as well. This reoccuring theme in Mark regarding the difference between watching from a distance or participating in an encounter:

“Mark concludes the crucifixion narrative by including the names of several women who “were watching from a distance.” This is undoubtedly an allusion to the lament in Ps 38:11, where the righteous suffering individual mourns his friends and neighbors who “stay far away… In Gethsemane (14:34.38) Jesus commanded “watching”…The word Mark uses for “watching” here is different however. Apart from its description of the women in 15:40,47;16:4, it occurs four times previously in Mark, and in each instance it depicts spectating or detached observation as opposed to seeing that leads to perception and conviction.”

Here, the Gospel according to Mark paints a picture of how it is that we come to know the truth of the resurrection in our own lives. Not as some extant, empirically proven, data point, as though we can fit it into a world that refuses to accomadate it’s shape and have it make sense. The reality is, no such “signs” would get us to such an encounter with a risen Lord. At best, if such a thing were to manage to break through that initial wall of resistance and unsettle us, we would be left with that same confusing witness of fear and amazement, standing as we would be from a distance. For Mark, even in the ancient world of second temple Judaism with it’s own set of concerns and questions, the good news is in fact found in the truth that, even where this distance exists, the risen Lord “goes ahead of us,” preparing the way forward into that promised new reality. This is where the Gospel begins (“See, I am sending my messanger ahead of you.” 1:2), and it is where the Gospel ends (“He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” 16:7)) Not in some version of divine hiddenness, but into an act of revelation. “There you will see him,” states the author of Mark, on the way, preparing the way, found in the particpatory nature of the faithful life.

Yes, this is unsettling for modernist conceptions of knowing. And yet this is precisely what Volf and Wiman are getting at in Glimmerings- such conceptions of knowing do not make sense of the lived life. That’s what the resurrection of Jesus helps uncover. On many fronts, and I am speaking for myself here, the modernist world I have been handed and find myself swimming within is the romanticized view, the invention of it’s illusions of progress and constructed versions of immortality spun by different names and different images, all in the name of infusing this existence with meaning. All of the ways in which my once atheist predications sought to colour over the shape of such a reality and it’s logical implications by way of giving our newly constructed myths an authority they do not otherwwise have. All explained, biologically, socially, mentally, as mechanistic functions designed to colour our experience of reality with the comforts that such illusions afford us.

I know I am not alone in this, but for me this was one of the most difficult things to confront, was the logical implications of a world that takes this shape, and yet still needs to make logical and rational and coherent sense of the lived life. It doesn’t make our experiences of these illusions less real, but it does lead to some very real and difficult questions when conronting the question of what is actually true within this given framework of reality.

This to me is the great paradox of trying to make sense of something like the story we encounter in the Gospel according to Mark. On one hand, yes, it is about hope. It is about being handed a story that can tell us what freedom, so defined (or in need of defintion) is for. But in this sense there is an irony- that the contrary positions which assume a worldview that has no room for the resurrection would seem to be, logically speaking, hinged on a narrative which states that hope itself, when defined according to those processses, is a necessary illusion.

It would seem then, and I think this tends to be the central point of modern forms of skepticism, the source of the tension is that tricky word called truth. What seems to be abundantatly evident in either case is that narrative matters to shaping what we see as true. For the Gospel of Mark, true sight comes by way of the lived life, and to live we need a narrative. This is as fundamental to the human experience as the breathe in our lungs.

I am reminded here of an old familiiar hymn, one that, in a moment of reflection on my guiding narrative I (somewhat) re-wrote verse 2 with a slightly different or shifted emphasis as a way of capturing those particular nuances. Every time I sing this song or hear this song in it’s common form, I bring these re-accentuated lyrics to mind, reminding myself of the story I am particpiating in. The reason I am reminded of this here is because, i think it captures so much of the narrative I have found on my journey through the Gospel according to Mark over these last number of months, the very narrative that comes alive for me in encountering the resurrection of Jesus in this world afresh:

Crown Him the Lord of Life who triumphed over (the Powers of Sin and Death), and rose victorious in the strife for (the creation) He came to save. His (the gift of his glorious indwelling presence in creation) now we sing, who died, and rose on high, who died to bring (the new creation) to be, and lives that (the Powers of Sin and Death) may die.

In the book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Volf references Scheler’s Ressentiment in referencing Scheler’s particular critique of Nietzsche “wrongly lumping” modern western morality with Christian morality. In his view, one cannot understand the Christian narrative apart from understanding the ways in which love itself frees us from the restraints of our moral constructs. The westernization of our world has largely led us to neglect the fact that “All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is striving, an aspiration of the lower toward the higher. The beloved is always higher, the lover is always lower.”

For Scheler, the difference between Ancient Greek and Christian accounts of love, which is what we find being made apparent in the life and letters of Paul (beginning with what is arguably one of, if not the earliest reference we have to the Christ confession, the borrowed poem of Philippians 2), is it’s conception of love’s directionality. For the Ancient Greek, the stories represent the “universe” as a great chain, where “the lower always strive for and is attracted by the higher.” Here there is only this upward movement, stories which beckon one to ascend to the deity, which “itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love.”

In other words, as Volf puts it, “In this account, love is a vehicle that carries one to the state of non-love.”

In Christopher Beha’s exceptional book Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, he offers a sweeping view of this Greek philosophical movement through it’s continental historical development, growing into the tenants of modern western culture and society. One of the most striking things about this development is the natural trajectory that we find from this upward movement to deism to western bents towards utilitarianism. The inevitable outcome of this narrative is both that we elevate ourselves to the form of the gods while distancing the gods from the world we are reconstructing. That we call this rationalism simply hides the fact that buried within these same philosophers is this consistent awareness of being held captive by the shadows of this reality we are constructing. And one of its most powerful chains that we bind ourselves to is in fact its moral systems.

Which is where Paul’s words break through all those years ago with his own awareness and critique of this inevitable trajectory. As Volf writes, “In the Christian account, the direction of movement is reversed,” which is precisely the point of Paul borrowing and using the poem in Philippians 2 in the way he does- he reframes it so as to illuminate it’s own need for the revelation of God to to be made known in it’s midst, rather than as something that needs to be attained. As he cites from Scheler, in the reversal of this movement from upward attainment to downward descent, in the story of Christ “There is no longer any highest good independent of and beyond the act and movement of… Love itself. (Love) is no longer a value of a thing, but of an act.”

This is a narrative that stands as antithetical to the myth of progress, the very story that continues to uphold the entire enlightenment project. The reality that this myth upholds is that this upward movement, seeking towards that which we must attain, requires our detachment from the chains of history. We don’t simply do away with the old gods, marked as they are by a lesser way of seeing and being and knowing, we recreate the world in our own image. The “our” in this case being an elevated and better human society. And yet, behind this sits the shadows of progress, justifying itself through the construction of its systems and technologies in a world where the imagined and largely defined aim can never reach beyond the authority of its own primordial and Neanderthal past- always and forever bent towards survival, with every fresh iteration of the newest and next enlightened generation convincing itself that it is the thing history has been desperate for and striving to obtain. Only, as things go, turning to perceive the emerging generation as threatening to send it all back to the age old rhetorical image of the dark ages from which we came.

All of this giving way to this inherent and underlying sense that maybe, just maybe, we will find ourselves arriving at the end of this ascent to find nothing but the shadows, the illusions that this whole human project thought it could create something that never existed in the first place.

Such are the cycles of the western narrative. The Christ narrative thus stands today speaking the same Gospel, the same revelation, into that central human tendency- the need and desire to remake this world in our own image. In Christ, this upward movement, in which we become gods and the gods become distant, is exchanged for the truth of the incarnation. Love made known, Love made true in this story of it’s downward decent. In its taking up residence in the world, in residing within it, transforming it’s view of it’s own idenity, shifting the story from that which it needs to attain to that which is gifted as the beloved. 

Some Good Friday reflections:

“This, then, is not a resume of advancement, but of downward movement… these two acts of incarnation and death are actually part of a larger story.” (Michael Gorman)

“What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened… The cross interrupts or invades the old age- the old myths and conventions and rationalities of the world. The cross unmasks the powers of this age for what they are; not the divine regents of life, but the agents of domination, violence and death. The cross inaugurates the new age or new creation in the midst of the old. And through this interruption of the old age by the new, the cross creates a space where believers may be liberated from the powers of this age both to resist their deadly ways and to begin living in the new creation.” (C Campbell)

“Here we encounter an apostolic witness to the reality and consequences of Christ’s odd triumph, whose relevance is found precisely in its irrelevance, it’s willingness to stand in the tension with some of our contemporary sensibilities… Death is here an instrument of the Savior’s proper work, something by means of which salvation is worked out… But at the same time, Death is also an instrument of the (Power’s) proper work, something by whose power women and men are held in fearful captivity. In the first case, Christ takes death upon himself for the sake of (the whole); in the second, the devil threatens and inflicts death upon (the very thing) Christ comes to save. Human life itself- “flesh and blood”- stands in the midst of this deadly contest over who controls death…. In this frame of reference, Death is anything but natural for it has been weaponized, as it were, within the disorder of the cosmos (the Latin Vulgate’s the “empire of Death).” (Philip Ziegler)

“It is not death as such (non-existence) but rather the vision of Death (the Powers, or the Empire) as divine judgment upon sin- death fundamentally repurposed and dentatured by sin- that terrifies… The Power of Death (the rule of Empire) as the future and final horizen of life reaches back into life itself to torment, alarm, oppress, and so to enslave.” (Ziegler)

“In some ways, and paradoxically, the casting off of the useless weight of the armour (by Frodo in the Lord of the Rings) is itself a kind of stripping for battle. Tolkien would have been familiar with the lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which the Passion is narrated by the cross itself, and the cross sees this stripping of Jesus not as an opposed humiliation but as a heroic preparation.” (Guite Golding)

I’m nearing the end of my journey through the book of Mark, the Gospel we have been reading with my Church body since Advent, and the Gospel I have been studying through at home alongside that. I have noted this in earlier reflections and posts, but one of my biggest take aways from my time with this Gospel is this notion of Mark’s narrative concern having three distinct parallel lines.

The first is telling the story the story of Israel. The second is telling the story of Jesus. The third, which is perhaps the one most neglected in common discourse and readings, is the fact that the author is writing this Gospel to a new creation community and telling their story.

As I noted previously, it’s original audience, and likewise those of us approaching it today as we endeavor to unpack that context, understood that these three parallel lines ran together, interweaving with one another through it’s interest in this singular and important question- what difference did the death and resurrection of Jesus bring about in their world.

To ask that in different terms- how does the world look different given the reality of the death and resurrection (and ascension) of Jesus.

What gets illuminated by taking these parallel lines together is the fact that, as these initial readers were reading the Gospel according to Mark they were also understanding this not simply to tell Israel’s story, nor only to be telling Jesus’ story, but to also be telling their story in light of this inquageration of a new creation reality. Readers would pick up on the narrative consruction, understanding the ways in which “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God,” (1:1) is in fact the beginning of their own story “in Christ.” At an editorial level, “their” own context is woven in to Mark’s Gospel all the way through, with language and references hyperlinking back to their own story as a community of people going through their own version of genesis, exodus, exile and liberation.

What informs the Gospel writer’s conviction however is in fact that this “version” of this familiar story is being told within the timeline (to use a crude word) of this inaugerated new creation reality.

It remains abundantly clear, this isn’t invention. This is conviction. And this conviction pours out into this central idea for Mark that they, and by natural conclusion for us occupying this new creation reality on the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection in this same timeline, we are all living this same story. In the framework of the Gospel, telling this story becomes an invitation to see it in the very same apocalpytic imagination that this second temple Judean context would have been steeped in- a revealing of where we are in this story, and, in the Christian narrative, to both find in Jesus the promised inaugeration of the new creation and, as Mark begins with the prophet isaiah, locating the image of Christ as being present in the entirety of the cosmic and historical story of Israel. To borrow from the citation above, “What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened…”

This is the central concern and tension behind the questions pervading this Gospel’s original audience, set as they are against the shadows of Rome. These are the same questions we ask today in our own contexts.

For me, one of the great challenges I have long wrestled with as someone who embodies and occupies space in the particular framework that is the larger western enterprise, with it’s own visions of Empire, is this way in which this necessary question has been seemingly buried by our shifting emphasis on to the empirically laden “is Jesus historically true” and “is the bible true” type of concerns. In the language of this enterprise and it’s Empire, the question that Jesus’ death and resurrection once posed to these early communities, soaked in the conviction that something did indeed happen, gets entirely rewritten, exchanged for apologetics and it’s counter-factions. In the process, something my 7 year old self was already picking up on and wrestling with and pushing back on all those years ago, the real dilemma of our conscious awareness of this existence becomes a kind of sacrificial lamb. Rather than recognizing the cosmic reality that our rational senses intuitively understand to be true within the framework of our lived lives (the world we observe AND experience), we give interpretive precedence to the human instituions of our age (the Empire and it’s sciences), as though they can lay claim to their own authoratative presence, and in the process we incorporate romanticized and reductionist redefinitions of Sin and Death based on what are at their core materialist presuppositions and the moral (constructed) systems that afford these presuppositions a kind of power and control over the cosmic reality we both share and embody. And by and large, I think it can be argued that western christianity came to incorporate this same language, recasting it as it becomes it’s own sort of institutional alignment with the enterprise and it’s new found myths.

In short- we have become experts at remaking the narrative in our own image, and at deceiving ourselves about the root of the problem- cosmic enslavement.

There is an addtional element to this as well, which has its own parallel lines being made evident within the Gospel according to Mark. That is how the author understands the role of “the Powers” which stand in stark resistance to the resurrection of Jesus. As a decidely and distinctly Jewish conception, situated within the language of second temple Judaism, the Powers were seen to be synonymous with the terms Sin and Death, and these terms could (and would) flow interchangeably between the three central uses of these terms- a cosmic ruler, an enslaved state, and the distinct participation in this state or in allegiance to this ruler. As such, much scholarly work over the last 20 years has been recovering this partiuclar understanding of this language, lost as it’s become within the lengthy movement of a western, evangelical rhetorical reconstituting of what, as I am arguing here, is in fact a far more robust picture of sin than the “moral failure” distinctions made common today. This is something we also see made abundantly clear in the Gospel according to Mark. Ancient readers, standing in that long Tradition concerning the story of Israel, were equally adept at applying the “Powers” to the earthly ruling Empires. Leaders are made synonymous with the “seed of the serpent,” and the Empires are made synonyous with the cosmic Powers that enslave the whole of creation. This ability to move between the comsic and the particular is paramount for undersetnading the story that is being told, and for understanding how it is being told (and indeed, the story of the early community it is being told to).

At it’s heart, understanding this cosmic story matters because it is what allows us to frame the realities of both Empire and our own questions of participation within it in the light of a narrative which makes sense of the lived life- our observation and experience of this world shaped by a historical imagination. Here, Sin and Death are not reducible, as they become in western appeals to forms of secular materialism, to “non-existance” and our moral constructs, both definitions which the above enterprise has intellectualized into forms of primary and governing “truths.” Rather, Sin and Death, taken within the Gospel narrative and the world that is informing it, is a systemic reality that this enterprise does not and cannot address. In fact, it effectively opposes it. It gives us actual language to name Death, and thus subsequently to name Life, and to make sense of that within the paramaters of our human observation and experience of this world. What has seduced modern, western Christianity, in line with the enterprise itself, is strikingly and startling, a romanticizing of Death. The problem with this of course is, Death is not reducible to non-existence. The language of Death speaks to the very qualities of our participation in in the world. To set this within the interests of logic, reason and a proper appeal to rationalism, the “world” our narrative is handing us needs to make sense of the world we observe and experience. And such a world must attend for the kind of reality we live in relationship to.

Put in other terms- it must make sense of the way life itself functions. That means we need a story that can qualify it and define it as something distinctly different from death. This is the inference of the citations above.

No amount of building of such human, constructed moral systems can free us from an enslaved reality to the Powers of Sin and Death. And yet, as I think the Gospel according to Mark is trying to argue, we continue to tell ourselves that it can. Growing up in the world of western, evangelical chrsistianity, I was long taught to think in such terms. In my circles, the problem was my moral failure (sin), and the solution was God’s satisfying a necessary payment of death. Thus, salvation, or it’s active component, atonement, was all about how we (or more accurately, I) build our lives (or in the more reformed version, how God builds our lives) in a way that accords with what becomes a Gospel of Jesus’ “moral accomplishment.” Meaning, Jesus reflects the moral perfection we were meant to but failed to attain ourselves, thus making Jesus’ sacrifice effectual because of that perfection and leading us to, in some way shape or form, give our allegiance to these moral constructs and the social/societal constructs that hand them to us on political grounds, an elevated position of authority. The problem with this narrative is not just the obvious abuses this make available to such allegiances to the Powers (regardless of political allegiances), but about how it misses the story of salvation altogether. The former is about the world we seek to control by way of Death. The latter is about the world that needs liberating according to LIfe.

It misses the movement that the story represents, between these two realities defined by different rules.

It misses the ways in which the sin of participation is inately clarified by the thing (the cosmic rule or enslavement) it is participating in.

It misses the way in which the Gospel writers, including Mark, along with the world these Gospels emerged within (including Paul), understood terms like atonement and salvation, terms that, if we are to answer the question of our own participation in the new reality it brings about, must begin with the cosmic narrative, the cosmic concern. Here, the victory is not, as the citation suggests above, the Death which has been de-natured, but the Resurrection and ascension- the inagueration of a new reality. As a book I’ve been slow-reading over the past while puts astutely, Union with the Resurrected Christ: Eschatological New Creation and New Testament Theology (G.K. Beale), for the ancients this eschatological reality was inherent in this story from the beginning. It is what allows the ancients to think in terms of past, present, future all at once. Thus we have misundertood the apocalyptic language and phrasings to think only in terms of an ending. Jesus, breaking into the middle of history as He does, complicates this way of thinking, precisely because it forces us to ask the perennial question, what changed. How are things different. Here, the emphasis of modern theologies on the death of Jesus as the atoning sacrifice consistently confuses the what and the how, precisely because it’s trying to answer it outside of the temple imagery this language is trying to evoke.

I think this confusion is more self evident than many want to recognize. Rather than engage that question, it becomes far easier to simply edge it into the background of our tightly guarded and cleverly constucted theologies. We ignore the fact that this is also what the whole enlightenment project does with its own percieved stumbling blocks. The stuff that challenges the tightly guarded commitments of the myth of progress gets swept under the rug where it doesn’t have to be attended for.

In both cases, and in its own way, the thing being swept out of mind and sight is in fact Death itself. In the case of the western enterprise, the stuff of Death takes on the language of Life. In the case of the Christian narrative, our efforts to define atonement in terms of the “death” of Christ leads us to miss the very grounds upon which the writers and the cultures and communities in the ANE make sense of the new reality Christ brings about- the resurrection and ascension. For them, the sacrificial language is not rooted in death (in fact, death is precisely the thing it wants to reconstitute as resurrected life, in practice, a concept rooted in this movement between two spaces or two realities). What make the person and ministry of Jesus a saving work, a saving work that indeed brings about atonement, is His effectual defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death. It is the fact that Jesus brings about the inaugeration of a new reality as part of that familiar and entrenched eschatological way of life and thought.

This, for me, is the true power of that narrative, and why I think it encompasses a true form of hope. In naming these two realities, it hands us a way to name Death. And in naming Death, it hands us a way to name Life. Not as a future reality, but as a qualitative one that we experience in the here and now.

As I’ve been reading through the Lenten devotional, Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings by Guite Golding, I’ve been struck by this unique group of individuals whom I think got this in a way very few have. Standing in this liminal space, between the modernists and the romantics, they had this sense that something was off, and they used story to attempt to communicate and flesh this intuition out. as they wrote and discussed and debated together. At it’s heart was their deep understanding regarding the importance of the story itself. More than this though, woven into the fabric of all of their narratives is this sense that our myths must, and need, to attend honestly for both Death and Life. Apart from this, and indeed, for them they would also say apart from Christ, we are only left with the echos of our great deceptions.

As my commentary on the Gospel according to Mark notes, “When Jesus dies, rejected and alone, the most significant event of the Gospel transpires; the temple curtain is torn in two…” Thus, it becomes clear, is the resonant sound of God’s presence, residing as it did in the temple (the temple itsself being a microcosm of the garden space within it’s liturgical expression) now abiding in the whole of creation. This becomes the central movement of God in Christ. Death is reconstituted as Life, or more accurately put, in the defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death, that which Death holds in its grip has been reconstituted as Life. Meannig, it, even creation itself, becomes a qualitatively different thing. The question is, do we have the language to recognize what this is, and do we have a narrative that can justify our hope that this, this basic and evident dynamic of our observation and experience of the world we occupy, has in fact has been made true in our midst.

Before I was born, both of my parents left the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) for Winnipeg, leaving the rest of my extended family behind. Being the only ones not living in the GTA, at least until my later years when we were joined by one of my cousins, meant that we grew up somewhat distanced from those relationships, and certainly from the drama and dynamics of being in close proximity. Distance, of course speaking geographically, but also, and more important, to lesser and greater degress in connection.

It might be more appropriate to say that it gave the relationship to our extended family a unique flavour, marked most notably by our annual trips Eastward, either to my grandparent’s cottage in the summer or to my cousin’s house at Christmas. It was rare for them to come our way, thus most of my memories come from those intentional trips, mainly by car, sometimes by train.

This is also likely why the strongest of those relationships was with this particular set of cousin’s. What made that unique was not simply that we spent the majority of our time with them, and they were closest in age to us, but that they consisted of three girls while we were three boys. Very different households, and yet this difference I think allowed us to form those bonds over the years. The distance would become greater once us three boys graduated, no longer having the anual traditions of heading East to depend upon. This would be something I would revisit over the years in different seasons of my life, be it through establishing a new-found routine when we got married, and once again when we adopted our son Sasha years later.

It’s interesting to note that, being older now I am far more aware of our specific cultural differences, coming as we do from different parts of Canada. It’s apparent in the accents. It’s also apparent in the lifestyles. Maybe one of the most prominent differences is the fact that when it comes to Ontario, they tend to be a lot more centralized in the way they think, live and function. It makes sense, as that whole “center of the universe” mentality emerges from the fact that very short drives puts them in any number of major city populations, not to mention never being far from the next city or town over. There is a sense in which Canada’s identity flows from the capital outwards. In contrast, the closest Canadian city of significance (sorry Brandon and Regina) to Winnipeg is a 14 hour drive one way, and a 24 hour drive the other way. Hence why for a Winnipeger the road trip is ingrained in our psyche. It is nothing for us to turn Calgary or Edmonton into a weekend trip. Equally so, it is a Manitoba tradition to head over the border, being situated 40 minutes from it, for anything from a day trip to a weekend to a week away in Fargo or Minneapolis.

And while we certainly know what it is to make our home in this river town, we tend to think with one foot grounded and in, and the other out exploring the greater world. If we are horrified over the thought of being stuck for hours on the 401 as a lifestyle, a cognitive disonnance created by our 20 minute commutes (this is changing, but forever and a day that is one of our calling cards, that you can get to the other side of the city from anywhere in 20 minutes), we do have this ingrained and in-born love for experiencing these other lifestyles as visitors and as learners. Just as long as we know we have our famliar community back home (and not inconsequentially, that community is what lends us a strong sense of culture, especially when it comes to the music scene).

I am well on the way to digressing here, but the reason I was bringing up my extended family, and in-particular my cousins, was to simply note that this absence of girls in our household changed dramatically during our time at Morningmeade with the arrival of our foster sisters. While I am using sisters in plural, some didn’t stay long (I remember one didn’t even last a day), while others were more permanent fictures as part of the family, travelling with us as we continued to move again, and again, and again. It’s interesting to note then, while I technically only have two siblings, both brothers two years apart on either side of me, it would also be true to say that those same formative years included my sisters in a very real way. And not unlike my three cousins, I always found it easier to connect with the girls. This would flow out into my young adult life, but here I think the presence of my sisters did afford me something of a reprieve from my experiences at school.

What’s significant about Morningmeade in particular is that this is where most of those relationships were initially established (including with the one whom would go on to marry my brother). In some ways, while my brother’s were out building their lives (or planting the seeds for where life was soon going to take them), I was spending time with these then strangers becomming more and more of a common fixture.

It would be when I aproached my later years at Calvin Christian School that we would eventually move again, this time a bit southward to a street called Sharon Bay, a smaller house in a still developing area (that I subsequently no longer recognize today). A single floor bungalo, with a fully finished basement, This is where I got my first job, delivering papers for the Winnipeg Free Press. This was back when they let younger kids work. It was also at a time when paper delivery happened in the afternoons rather than the mornings, making one of my routines coming straight home from school to complete my route.

Delivering papers would actually be a job I would return to at a few different junctures in my life, usually when I found myself between jobs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. When it eventually became an early morning gig, I came to cherish the early rising. It was quiet, and there was something about the nature of the job leaving you largely on your own that I appreciated and enjoyed, save for the brief period when they made you go house to house collecting your money from customers (that part I didn’t enjoy). Plenty of time to spend getting lost in thought. Saturday’s was it’s own special routine, racing to get it done so that i could make it back for what was 5 straight hours of Saturday morning cartoons. That was back when saturday mornings cartoons were still an institution.

Eventually those “early morning” hours transitioned into middle of the night hours, the paper trying to compete to get it’s news out first. Those 3 AM wake up calls were an extra special kind of quiet, that’s for sure.

Delivering papers in the afternoons did have it’s own set of perks, being out as I was in the light of day. Unbeknownst to me, I had a secret admirer for a while. At least until one day the girl finally decided to stop and talk to me. It was actually on a day when I was out collecting from my customers. Having knocked on one door and having no one answer, I turned around to come back to the sidewalk where I had left my bike. That’s when a younger girl had made her way over. Looking at me, she gestured behind her. “See that girl over there,” she says. I look, and see a girl who looks closer to my own age. “She likes you,” the younger girl says.

At this point I found myself frozen in place. I didn’t know what to say, and the more I stood there in silence the more the terror was building up inside me. It wasn’t particularly hot out, but I was starting to sweat like I had stepped straight into a sauna. “Well,” the younger girl speaks up again, breaking the silence. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

At that moment, panic finally taking over, I got back on my bike and raced off. I did run into her again at a later date. Suffice to say I was no longer getting a look of admiration.

I have mentioned the gradual and growing absence of my older brother in my early years already. While much of this had to do with that two year difference creating seperation between our social circles, and certainly him being in different schools for most of my life played a factor, there was also the fact that he found himself on his own path at this point in his life, wrestling with some of our handed down beliefs. In truth, this sort of questioning and wrestling is actually a quality that we have shared over the years, and something that has played a role in keeping some level of connection alive as the years have gone on. But, it was also a source of tension, both in the ways it created that distance and in the way I tried to make sense of it.

When we moved to Sharon Bay, this is when tensions between him and my dad were at their highest. I would have been 13/14 years old, my brother 16. My brother had gravitated towards staying out late, coming home at erratic times, or not coming home at all. And usually when he did he reeked of smoke or alcohol. There were encounters inside the house, one specific one which was capped off by the distinct and memorable phrase “if you don’t like the damn rules, there’s the damn door.” There were locked doors and signs out that night after my brother left, indicating that should he make his way back home he could find shelter in the garage instead. Eventually he disappeared altogether, having started a relationship with one of our foster sisters whom was a few years older than we were. All I knew at that time was that he had more or less disappeared from life at home, no longer around in the evenings and largely absent from family suppers. Definitely absent from church.

It was around this same time that my younger brother had moved to a different church, getting involved in a youth group that had bonded him to a new social circle. In a sense, while my one brother was moving in one direction, my younger brother was staking his claim in another, planting the seeds of what would become over 30 years in ministry work. Both shifting in their own ways meant the dynamic at home was changing, and I was left feeling somewhat lost in the middle (there’s that middle child syndrome again). Much of my time was spent at home alone with my favorite t.v. shows (back in the era of Full House and Perfect Strangers) in my room with my favorite books, spending time with my dog, who subsequently became my best friend over those years, or down in the basement banging away at the drums.

This is where I think my relationship with one of my longest standing and most consistent friendships, with a guy named Dan, also began to take a greater shape. While Dan had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember, the fact that they lived over an hour outside of the city meant that, up until this point, it was a relationship reliant on our parent’s planning. It was when we moved to Sharon Bay that they moved into the city, and thus he became something of an anchor during those years where more and more of the space at my house was becoming vacant. Sleepovers became a routine, wasting the hours away with our select role playing video games (back then it was the nintendo, and then eventually the super-nintendo). We were bonafide nerds, with one of our favorite choice of games called Uncharted Waters, which was modeled after the real world map, and in which we would promptly have our own large physical map unfolded and layed out on the floor beside the chips and cheesies, tracking our path and exploring the geography on screen.

As life would have it, at one point we eventully made a move all the way to the southern part of the North Kildonan/Elmwood area, to Johnson avenue, coming from the furtherst northern location we ever lived (Glenway Crescent). This was not only a change in social class, coming from a more upper class part of the city to a lower income area (it was actually one of our rental properties that my dad had been investing in over the years, now finding things stuck after the market crashed). it was a change in lifestyle. More importantly, as things went, we actually ended up moving right next door to Dan’s family, although it was somewhat short lived as they ended up moving again. And, much later I would find out that my future wife actually lived right across the street from us as well.

Sharon Bay is also where I transitioned from the old family drumset to an upgraded blue pearl set. This was around the time of my transitioning from Grade 9, then middle years, to Grade 10, the start of high school, a school that was actually a short walk from our Johnson avenue house. This would also mark a switch in schools, and with that came an opportunity to play. While I had been toying around with the guitar, an unfortunate fight with my dad resulted in him taking away my lessons. I can still see the disappointment on my teacher’s face as my dad yanked me out of there mid session. If I’m honest, this is still one of those “what if” moments, because I genuinely felt I had potential.

As life would move forward however, it became more and  more centered around the drums, to the point where that ended up subsuming my musical aspirations. In these early years however, it would be starting to take the drums more seriously that would become an in-road back into my younger brother’s world, being invited to play in the worship band at church, and also the starting point of what would become a whole new social circle, connecting with a group of musicians that had been hanging out with my older brother jamming from time to time in the basement. As my brother disappeared, they became my new identity.

Reflecting back on this ever shifting dynamics, it seems to me that life is a constant interplay with both fixed and malleable or shaping realities. Might it be that a single different trajectory or circumstance would be telling a much different story? Without a doubt. And yet, it’s hard not to also feel that who I say I am, the person for whom those influences are interacting, remains visible. As though all of life is a process of figuring out who that is within such a relationship. These are interesting questions for me. Am I shaped by a perpetual wrestlessness and anxiety, a need to dwell on the big questions, because circumstance created this need or this response, or is that a product of my interaction with such a world. This is the stuff, as I would discover later on, philosophers have spent endless books and traditions fleshing out throughout history.

Either way, this is the shape of my reality. This is the shape of my experience. Had I been born and lived in the GTA, in relative close proximity to Toronto, my story certainly changes. But it’s pretty difficult to imagine a reality where I am not drawn to story, where I don’t have this strong sense of isolation and being misunderstood, where I haven’t fostered a genuine love for all God’s creatures, where I don’t find myself disenchanted with the modern world.

Where I am not that middle child, or that biological case prone to anxiety.

Less difficult I suppose to appreciate what my particular circumstnace did gift me with- a love for maps and travel, the slower pace of life, the drums, my particular friends, my wife, my dogs.

Thus I am prone to think in terms of both-and. It is the push and pull of those fixed and malleable qualities of my life and story, and thus who I am, that sets me in relationship to it. Which is precisely where I can come to know both myself and the reality that surrounds me. As time pushes forward, this is going to become more and more distinct, beginning to to see some of those more concrete directions taking shape. A different season of my life, but as part of that larger conversation nevertheless still part of that narrative whole. The stuff above might seem and sound like benign deteails, but all of it will come to play an important role in where my life heads.

First quarter check in at the movies, 2026

In many respects, the first quarter of 2026 has demonstarted itself to be a relatively strong start to the year. As per usual, made stronger by the usual slate of awards contenders finally seeing wide release over the course of January. I am thinking of the likes of Vallade and Han’s Little Amelie, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, or my personal favorite of the bunch, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. All of which would be topping my 2026 list had I included them (as it is, I added them to my 2025 list). 

Alongside this though, is a year that started with the follow up to last year’s exceptional 28 Years Later (Bone Temple) . While I was a bit less high on it than many others, finding some narrative weakness in the overall story conception, there is no denying the strength of the trilogy, and having this leading the way definitely elevates the slate. 

Surrounding that was the dependable if predictable Statham led action flick Shelter, which I found to be refreshingly understated as a straightforward, no frills, thriller with a satisying script and a solid young star complimenting the weathered action hero (here less hero than weathered and aging soul), the underseen but surprisingly solid Austrlian apocalyptic zombie drama We Bury the Dead, which makes the most out of a creative premise and its alluring lead in Daisy Ridley, and lastly the by the numbers January filler in Primate, which is a short but competent formulaic suspense movie where a Primate kills everyone on screen.

Leaving aside Timur Bekmambetov’s slightly misguided Mercy, which despite not being as bad as the critics made it out to be, and even making it’s “made for IMAX 3D” format worth the investment, does fail to read the room regarding the temperament around AI in the present moment. The absolute highlight of January for me was the wide release of Bi Gan’s Resurrection, a film that plays with matters of perspective as it explores those liminal spaces between illusion and reality, standing as a thematic and cinematic celebration of the form itself. That and the experimental film The Mother and the Bear by Johnny Ma, a film about Winnipeg made by a local filmmaker, telling a story that is in many ways a love letter to the city, and which I got to see with a local crowd. This led the way in what has been a really good year thus far for Canadian film.

Not wanting to be left out, February came out swinging with the much anticipated and highly successful new film by Sam Raimi, Send Help, which for my money stood out most for McAdam’s go for broke performance. I never knew she had that in her.

Inbetween that buzzy release and later in the month the much talked about Wuthering Heights, a film that I didn’t care for but which definitely captured the moment on a cultural level, was a mix of VOD and smaller theatrical releases. On the VOD side, Pike River was definitely one of the standouts, a New Zealand project about a real life story involving a mining accident and the politics that surround it, and the women who fought back against the powers trying to silence it. A strong, quiet, emotionally laden effort with a real eye for it’s characters.

Batting straight down the middle were a handful of fine but forgettable films, including the latest Dave Bautista film, The Wrecking Crew (which had it’s moments for a bigger, surface level action film), and two rom-com’s in F Valentines Day and Kissing is the Easy Part (I liked the former more than the latter).

Topping that list of VOD films however was without question La Crazia, the latest from Paolo Sorrentino (The Hand of God). A timely political movie that is less about the politics and far more about those universal questions regarding what it means to be human and what it means to wrestle with ones legacy as a human. And more so, how this seeking after legacy can enslave our sense of personhood or identity to it’s narrative in ways that often run larglely external to our own sense of control. It’s a character study, but it’s also a philosophical exercise to this end, and one that I resonated with in a big way.

Back on the big screen was the next Canadian effort in line, Nirvanna, the Band the Show the Movie, which for someone like me going in blind with zero awareness of the show definitely cemented itself as likely the funniest film I will see all year (and one of the most enjoyable theater experiences). And finally got to see the new Luc Besson film as well, which was his take on the Dracula story. It took that story in certain directions I did not expect on a visual and thematic level, and it really won me over to it’s mix of serious and camp, giving me lots to think about and sit with regarding larger themes of life and death and what redemption means in light of those tensions.

Say what you will about the Angel Studios release Solo Mio (and trust me, I have a lot of my own words about the studio), but my wife Jen and I have a ton of great memories of routinely watching King of Queens before Letterman (or Conan), and equally from our time in Rome. Setting the quality of the movie aside, checking those two boxes were enough to get us out to watch it, and sure enough we got some version of “King of Queens goes to Rome.”

Quietly taking over the box office in the midst of this was the little animated movie that could in GOAT, which earned it’s way into the conversation with a good script and that off the radar appeal.

A film that actually did pretty good for it’s genre, but neverthless deserved more eyeballs on the big screen was Crime 101, a throwback to those old school car chase thrillers that, if a bit too long in runtime, gives us a little bit of everything. That and the follow up to the really solid Emily the Criminal in How To Make a Killing. While not as good, it was still the sort of film that we need, in a healthy theater landscape, to support. The mid-budget, smaller scale originals made by boots on the ground creatives (in this case John Patton Ford). The uniquly ambitious and bombastic Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die by Gore Verbinksi would also fit this bill.

March really became known for three things- the success of Hopper, the advertised failure of The Bride, set alongside the complete takeover of Project Hail Mary. In my opinion, Hoppers hits all the marks it needeed to in order to justify it’s rise to prominance, even while, for me, still sitting behind films like Elio and Elemental in terms of it’s creative vision. The Bride is where I would want to go to bat the most however, as it’s one of my favorites of the year thus far, messy but creative, and never less than interesting as it balances fun and serious in a visionary fashion. Whatever expired milk some of the critical voices were drinking, unfortunately it controlled the narrative surrounding this film, seeeping intto the cultural ethos and announcing it dead upon arrival before it even had a chance. There’s still hope however that the film could somehow gain some kind of cult status down the road, as I do know those who are on it’s side really liked it a lot, to the point where it has a passionate defence.

Not much more needs to be said about Project Hail Mary- big movie that’s hitting the marks people want in dire times. Much more does need to be said though about EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert, one of the definite films of the year made by the same director who gave us the recent biopic (one of my favourites of that year). It’s not just an excellently crafted and edited concert film, which weaves far more into the territory of narratively driven documentary, it’s a suprisingly satisfying viewing experience, in that the footage manages to somehow give fresh insight, or at least shed a fresh light on, the enigmantic figure. That alone is impressive, but it’s the spell the film casts, inviting us into his charismatic and complicated (and tortured) allure, that was most memorable.

Some other films to note from March, which I did seperate thoughts on recently (so brief mentions here)- an experimental Canadian film, Alberta Number One, the always compelling Jim Jarmusch in his latest effort Father Mother Sister Brother, the Ukrainian sci-fi film getting swalloed up by Project Hail Mary, U Are the Universe, the decent follow up to Ready or Not (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come), the unsettling horror film The Plague and the Canadian film Undertone.

As well, there was Winnipeg Directors McLellan and Trudeau in the northern thriller Hair of the Bear, Canadian Director Anita Doron in the compelling and quite explicit Maya and Samar, and my two top releases of the month, the haunting The Voice of Hind Rajab and the emotionally captivating All That’s Left of You.

Still needing to catch up with three anticipated films I missed- They Will Kill You and Forbidden Fruits, both of which still have at least another week in their theatrical runs, and Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, which unfortunatley finished it’s run.

In terms of larger narratives, the dominant storyline of course has been the up again, down again dramatics of the WB merger, which remains in disarray and will likely be mired in all sorts of complications over the coming months- don’t be surprised to see it challenged. An unfortunate distraction as things go, given that the real issues this whole thing has been bringing to the surface regarding the present state of the industry would be far better served by addressing actual regulation and vision.

As things go, there’s been a notable trend towards the different ways in which the artists are beginning to speak up about the present state of the industry as of late. And it should be noted, I am noticing a willingness to speak more bluntly and unfiltered. What comes from the select few whom find success these days (leaving the discussion of measure to the side) tends to be different than the creatives, established or not, whom find thsemselves fighting against the system just to stay alive. Listen to the differences between voices like Emerald Fennell, Daniel Chong, and Lord and Miller, and conversations with those like Maggie Gyllenhaal and John Patton Ford, films that were labeled failures. One can hope this serves to tease out the nuances of the discussion over the next while, as playing the success of something like Project Hail Mary, as great as that is, as a catch all for “there is not a problem” continues to miss the forest for the trees (sorry Gosling, I don’t think your speech really gets it).

And yes, if because I keep banging this drum precisely because I think speaking about it is necessary, one of the biggest things people can do is keep watching how a giant like Netflix continues to take advantaage of a landscape weak in regulated terms and caught in continued chaos. That’s the thread with the most relevance and the most power.

To note some positives of the last whle:

– the discussion the merger helped bring to the forefront still feels like it’s somehwat in play, save for getting caught in the political war

– there seems to be some genuine interest in challenging the Canadian film culture to step up to the plate when it comes to defining it’s shape and it’s presence (see the platform the Directors for “Nirvana…” have been utilizing over these last few months), especially where it comes to actually looking at what Canad’s Online Streaming Act is meant to defend (once a product of 20th century anxieties about American cultural influence, it is now grappling with the present global realities- see OPEN CANADA article, “Preserving Canadian Culture in the Platform Era from March 18th). To cite that article, ” 

If Canadian cultural policy was built on the assumption that supporting domestic production would shape what audiences see, that link is now mediated by platforms that Canada does not control

That is the conversation at the forefront right now over these last few months- how to connect powers and agencies outside of our culture to a systsem that continues to feed our cultural values, including indigenous and french, independent and canadian theater chains, production, education, ceativity, even as the powers keep pushing back (which of course they will)

– a move like Universal (see: Universal expands their theatrical window) and Amazon (recommitting to more investment in theaters- see Project Hail Mary) is good news

– Voices like Ted Hope, whom has been in the spotlight speaking to A24’s continued value for investment and their call for advocating for regulation is good news

– European regulations being brought into play alongside Canada, arguably where regulations and systems are much stronger than ours, is good news (see the article by Leslie Griffin, Trade Barriers Evolve With Movie Streaming Trends, from Hinrich Foundation). Back in the 1920’s, European coutnries offered subsidies to combat the Hollywood system encouraching on the “keepers of culture” in foreign locations, subsidies that “imposed screen quotas and (windows).” Eleven countries still have this in place. These are the things that now global entities have been challenging and that discussions must address. An interesting note here that breathes some nuance into the ongoing discussions, which is assessing how regulations to protect against Hollywood have also in some ways hindered local film cultures in that it makes it more difficult to find their own global presence.

In any case, some thoughts that have been with me over the past three months. Been also watching the continued redevelopment of The Garry Theater, of which I became a friend (donor) in its preservation. Attended a session at Winnipeg Public Library on the history of Canadian and Winnipeg theaters. I continue to support my local arthouse as a member, which is deeply embedded in fostering and growing Winnipeg film and its filmmakers.

Lastly, here’s where my top 12 of 2026 stands as of the end of March (with the picture rounding out the top 20):

1. All That’s Left of You
2. Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert
3. The Voice of Hind Rajab
4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
5. La Grazia
6. Resurrection
7. The Bride
8. Project Hail Mary
9. Send Help
10. The Plague
11. The Mother and the Bear
12. We Bury the Dead

Alberta Number One (Alexander Carson)- An experimental film from a Canadian director that blends travelogue with art with documentary, exploring the boundaries of genre and bringing to life our deep connection to a sense of place

Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert (Baz Luhrmann)- From the same hand that gave us the recent biopic, one of my favourites of that year, this blend of rare concert footage into a narrative driven documentary form  probes underneath one of America’s most tragic stories. Elvis is a microscosm of so much of what that culture is and means, and here the allure and power of his spell is brought alive in a visceral way.

U Are the Universe (Kocmoc)- A Ukrainian space odyssey that is flying under the radar of the much more buzzy and populous Project Hail Mary, but exploring some similar themes in a similar way. I was glad to see this one first, as I think in many ways it helped preserve the modest but authentic experience of the film which might have been drowned out by the spectacle of the latter. I always enjoy uncovering Ukrainian films and directors as they aren’t always easy to get access to.

Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (Jim Jarmusch)- The Latest from celebrated indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Paterson, The Dead Don’t Die, Only Lovers Left Alive), steers his penchant for darker stories towards a family triangle. Told in segments, it’s a story about estrangment and those difficult family dynamics that both push us apart and hold us together. What might be it’s biggest accomplishment is the way it weaves a story about siblings into a working allegory regarding the absence of the parents. That this is the thing that brings the siblings together also becomes the means by which Jarmusch fleshes out the lingering dynamics of what pushed them apart in the past. It might all be a bit undercooked and inconsistent, but it definitely has a creative vision.

The Bride (Maggie Gyllenhaal)- For all the headlines dictating the film’s box office failure (the only relevance there being it’s bottom line, not it’s quality), Gyllenhaal’s follow up to The Lost Daughter manages to take what I felt was one of the weaknesses in her debut and grow it into a compelling character study. It’s bold, it’s messy, but for my money this is the more interesting take on the iconic (related) characters than Del Toro’s decidedly more traditional interpretation of last year (and he’s my favorite director). There’s more gloss and more steadied control in Frankenstien, but if I was going to revisit a film, The Bride is the one which richer layers to mine. And that set design and choreography- captivating, gorgeous and poetic.

Hair of the Bear (James McLellan, Alexandre Trudeau)- A solid debut from a Manitoba filmmaker, making great use of the northern wilderness backdrap. It’s low budget, which, as is typically the case, makes itself most known in the editing and the plotting, but I think it knows it’s limitations and plays to it’s strengths, gaining confidence as it goes.

Hoppers (Daniel Chong)- I am not as high on this one as some others (I found it to have narrative issues), but I am still glad seeing it find success. This isn’t on the level of the Pixar greats, which seemed to hit it’s stride at least 10 or so years ago. Nor is it finding it’s way through the more creative and visionary standouts of Pixar’s recent years (for me Elemental and even last year’s Elio are the far more interesting films, even if Hoppers might be more evenly constructed as a film). But it’s got some mojo, and it’s certainly designed to have broad appeal. And if nothing else, it’s given us a fresh slate of memorable characters.

All That’s Left of You (Cherien Dabis)- The third film by the Palestinian filmmaker, and the first since 2013, might take place in the past, but it couldn’t be more timely. It makes the choice to keep the violence framing the film’s story in the backdrop and out of sight, which I think is a choice that evelates this film to a whole other level (others felt differently, it’s worth noting). Instead, this allows the director to really hone in on the narrative and themes that the film wants to flesh out and explore (displacement, immigration, parenthood, faith, identity). One of the aspects of the film that really struck a chord for me was the film’s ability to also take these micro-themes and overlay it against a more cosmic level reflection on the shape of Life and Death woven into the facric of our shared reality. Here the filmmaker shows an astute awareness and understanding of this kind of rooted storytelling that many others miss, and it results in what is thus far one of the film’s of the year for me.

Undertone (Ian Tuason)- Another Canadian film and director on the slate, this one boasting a bigger budget and higher profile, something it uses to really make it’s presence known. It’s a classic horror film, straight forward, no frills, but effective, especially where it comes to showing restraint. Plot wise it’s really leaning into a couple key ideas and devices, but it’s careful not to overplay that too early and too soon. I know it worked for some but not for everybody, which is to be expected from a horror film, but I found it, at least for the moment, to really draw me in to it’s very sensory driven experience. I was glad to see it with a crowd.

Arco (Ugo Bienvenu)- The oscar nominated animated feature from French Director felt like it should have had a bigger impact than it ultimately did. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something that felt off or disjointed about the high concept sci-fi premise. Is it that it feels like a Studio Ghibli clone? i don’t think that’s that problem, but maybe. Was it that I saw the english dub (with a stacked voice cast albeit) and the experience and vibe got lost in translation? Possibly. That feels more likely than the Ghibli comparison. I just didn’t find the story to be all that engaging. It didn’t help that the more interesting story dynamics and characters in the film are sort of buried behind Arco (not to mention too much of a visual presence in terms of the colours and design). It’s got time travel though and that always gets points from me. If it had done more with it I think that would have gone a long ways to rectifying some of the felt problems.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)- A Tunisian filmmaker, this hyper focused and haunting dramatization of a single moment in Gaza demonstrates the ways in which some art transcends the creative medium. It asks us to imagine a future where the violence ceases. Whether that imagintion feels possible, the film grants us the permission to grieve as we approach even the potential of that hope.

Maya and Samar (Anita Doron)- Set in contemporary Athens, this Canadian film by a Canadian-Hungarian director (raised in Ukraine) demonstrates that eclectic cultural backdrop by delivering an often explicit (be forewarned), but compelling commentary on the ways in which we tend to judge others, here pushing into the layered reality of the films central themes revolving around an Afghan immigrant, her sexuality, and the intertwining conversations surrouding culture divide. It’s not an easy sit, but carried by some strong performances and a willingness to take an uncensored approach, I found myself thinking about it quite a bit aftewards. Which I think is what it set out to accomplish.

Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller)– Certainly the biggest film of the year thus far by any measure. Also featuring the return of Phil and Christopher Miller. As far as adpations go, I felt the film filled in some of the weaknesses that I found in the book. Namely the lack of emotional depth and presence, which the visual storytelling really makes front and center. It’s also a genuine crowd pleaser, doing the job of taking a science fiction story and making it accessible to the masses. who might not normally read or watch this kind of stuff.

The Plague (Charlie Polinger)- Works great as a piece of psychological horror (put young kids at the center and it always makes things more unsettling). Even more impressive that this is a debut.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett)- These director pairings are becoming more and more trendy. Following up on the successful and surpsingly fun and enjoyable Ready or Not, the sequel needs to find a way to up the game and, in my opinion, does it by way of copious amounts of blood. It’s outlandish, the plot stretches points of believability beyond the breaking point in sections, often in service of convenience, but if it’s a slight step down from the first, if you liked that one I think you’ll enoy this one. There’s no doubt the on screen cast is still having fun.

Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (BenDavid Grabinksi)- A time travel narrative wrapped up in a ridiculously entertaining ride follwing two gangsters and the woman they love. The aim is simple- survive one wild night and embrace the chaos in doing so. The director (if I am right, he comes from the television world) understands and mission and delivers something that is very much worth your time.

*this is part of an ongoing project of working on my life story. Posting some very rough drafts of portions of that exercise over the course of this year is a way to hold myself accountable to keep pushing forward with it. Having it in a public space is a small step towards that end.

If I have the count right, this would be house number 4 by the time I was in Grade 4 (technically 5, if you count the country home at the edge of the city in which I was born, before my family relocated  to Manitoba avenue in the North End)

Morningmead Walk

Google shows it to be a 6 minute drive from our previous residence at Eade Crescent. Which of course means an adequate driver can likely do it  in 4 (update: it took me 7, but I blame the driver in front of me)

This was the start of a (somewhat) revolving door of foster sisters coming in and out of our lives.

A new family dog

The meeting of a new family childhood friend

Finding my place in a new school

Days off and long evenings spent riding our BMX at the bowl down the street

Here is where I would experience my first crush, my first fight, and above all be forced into the pitfalls of puberty and the never ending drama of middle grade that follows in it’s wake.

Back then, Calvin Christian only went up to Grade 9. Later on (very later on) I would actually end up getting hired on as one of the bus drivers for Calvin, of which one of my main jobs was shuttling students between the elementary (K-6) in North Kildonan, my old stomping grounds, to the newly expanded middle grade/high school (7-12) in Transcona approximately 25 minutes away. But for now, the humble space, marked by it’s (still seasonly constructed) iconic wooden walled winter skating rink (along with the also still going soup and skate nights), a fenced in yard that made it feel like a prison, and the long single hallway connecting the newer and older sections of the school while giving some seperation between the younger and older grades. And of course, in this school all roads lead to the gym at the far western end of the hallway.

It was also in grade 4, my first year at the school, that I got my hearing aid, something I would later abandon heading into high school. I can still remember, the brainchild of both my mom and my teacher, being encouraged to bring it to show and tell on morning, where I was bestowed the honour of publically demonstrating how this monstrousity worked. This was back in the day when those things were the size of a 1990’s portable phone (which, in case you don’t know, required a whole seperate compartment or backpack, depending on how exactly you preferred to advertise the “you can’t miss it” contraption to the world- also, unlike the data plans of today, calls were apparently very expersnive, something I learned after using it one night to call our home phone (from inside our own house) as a prank; my dad was not impressed to say the least).

Another first- this was the year I was introduced to the drums. My parents would eventually buy a cheap, introductory set for all three of us boys, putting us through lessons with a local legend from the Winnipeg church community, but even before this, in Grade 5 I ended up meeting a boy from my class named Shan, whom from my elementary grade point of view was his own sort of veritable prodigy. I asked him to teach me, and was, to put it mildly, a little bit star struck by the fact that he said yes. He invited me to his home, brought out some ice cream pails and homemade sticks, and then proceeded to teach me the old reliable paradiddle. I bounced around between drums and guitar for a while, having left my early years piano lessons behind me. Eventually I settled on the drums in my Grade 10 year (after an unfortunate run in with my dad in front of my guitar teacher that very likely changed the direction of my life in the blink of that moment- a story for later). This was, however, the fertile ground where everything got set in motion for my life moving forward.

The only other (sort of) school friend I had, although to be fair Shan was more of an association than a friend, was a kid named Adrian. We were connected enough that he was willing to come out with me to our cottage one summer. Which for me, was about as good as it got. At the time, “cottage” meant an old, run down line of connected cabins, motel style, located through the bush sitting adjacent to the summer camp associated with my dad’s work. Eventually that connection faded away when we entered into Grade 7, and after he ended up switching to the public school, our paths never crossed again.

The reason for that brief mention is simply to underscore a simple fact of those lingering memories from this time in my life. It’s not that I was necessarily isolated or outcast. It was more that, even in these early years, I was already becoming adept at being and feeling alone and misunderstood as a person. I’ve already mentioned how, as a middle child, and as the only one not with the name John in my household, I was often the odd one, tagging along and generally participating in the escapades, but usually without the same sort of natural connection and confidence of my brothers. Here at school, I likewise played my part as a rather indistinct member of my grade, but I never truly fit in anywhere. I didn’t even really fit a category, too non-descript to qualify as a target for the class bullies, and too odd and weird to fit a type that might be recognized and molded into the social framework, at least in those initial early years. I engaged the school routine well enough, but when that bell rung I made my own way home and spent the rest of my time outside of those walls moving fluidly between play with my brothers and our neighbhorhood friend, and my safe place- holed up in my room with a book, writing, playing with our dog, or downstairs getting lost in my imgination with my action figures.

By Grade 7-9, the different social circles and cliques were essentially in place when it came to my class, and arguably becoming more defined. This was also when some of that indistinct and non-descript nature of my persona started to shift. I was beginning to become more noticeable, and something of an easy target in these later years. Not only for my skinniness, which funnily enough was a personal characteristic I only became aware of when someone from my Grade 6 class pointed it out in passing one day, but for my increasingly visible social awkwardness, my now grown long hair, impressively looking to reach about half way down my back, becomming more and more known as that kid who’s scholastic book order took up about 90 percent of the total class sales, typically resulting in the box being plopped straight on my desk in the middle of class, and my seemingly endless rotation of christian t-shirts (that Mega-life one was a personal favorite) that I cycled through over and over on any given week. Ironically, I’ve often wondered if I would have stood out less in a public school.

At its peak, I can remember a particularly tough incident that happened during recess (or break) in my Grade 9 year, the sort of moment where everything comes to a head (literally in this case). As was routine, most of my classmates headed down that long, single hallway to the gym once that bell rung, and I followed behind the masses. Being one of the last ones into the gym, I decided to pick up a basketball and shoot some hoops over in a corner, something I enjoyed doing with one of my closest childhood friends at home. At one point I turned around to find a cohort of 5 of my classmates suddenly surrounding me, led by the biggest of them all occupying the center. He asked what I was doing in the gym. They then proceeded to tell me that I didn’t belong there and wanted me to leave. Before I could respond, they took the basketballs they had in their hands and started whipping them at my head until eventually I left. I spent the rest of break holed up and crying in the upstairs locker room at the other end of that hallway.

I already knew that I was on the outside looking in. I had figured that out back in elementary. This was the first time though that I can remember genuinely feeling like I wasn’t wanted, that I didn’t belong. That there was something wrong with me. That t wasn’t safe to co-exist in the world as I was. Those feelings of isolation and being misunderstood had now translated into sosmething of a personifcation. And not one of my own making either. I wish I could say that growing up into adulthood helps change some of those feelings, helps change that reality. That the stuff of that middle grade trauma eventually matures and fades and that the world that surrounds you also grows up with it. But I’m not convinced it does. It’s not just the trauma that stays, it’s the ways it gets recontextualized into the grown-up world over and over again in it’s own distinct ways.

While I wouldn’t say I spent a whole lot of time chasing after trying to belong in these circles, I do remember one specific incident sthat followed a small attempt to navigate those trials. It started when my big brother, in a rare moment of still being around and in the mix, came up to me with his old binders from some of his classes at Calvin. He had since graduated after his own brief foray at the school, being two years ahead of me. In opening his binders, it quickly became evident that his tests and assignments, at least for this one particular class, were matching up almost line for line with mine. Which meant, for the low low price of whatever it was he sold them to me for, I had a bonafide collection of cheat sheets going forward. 

What’s somewhat ironic here is that I never actually did end up using them for myself, and my grades showed it. It was however an opportunity to get the attention of my classmates. As things tend to go though, while it did make me the center of their attention for a moment, their interest in me only went as far the time it took for them to copy the test answers down. Something they did in the middle of the class, passing it around to each other until the teacher (consquently of a different class) noticed. That’s when they plopped it back down in front of me and exited the room. 

That teacher went on to interrogate me, and then to pass it on to the one who was distributing the test to us the next day. It would be the next morning when he, a genuine giant of a man, inquired of me to stay after class. Only I didn’t hear him (at this point in time I had since abandoned that monstrousity of a hearing aid), and ended up quickly leaving the class in my efforts to avoid him once the bell rung. Before I knew it, he had tracked me down by the gym (literally, the hallways only ever led to that one place), had grabbed me by the ear, and was now dragging me by the ear back up the hallway to the class. 

And I thought being dragged by the ear only happened in books. I also once thought those oval bumps that emerge from the head after one gets hit or bonked only happens in cartoons- turns out stepping on the wrong side of a rake later on life destroyed that theory.

It should be said, this was not my first encounter with this teacher. It was however the most relevant to the stories I have been sharing above. Once back up in the classroom, I suddenly found myself being pressed up against the wall where this giant of a man just stood there staring at me. Next, thing I know he has me face down on a table where there just happened to be a cutting board right right in the spot where I was planted. Now, I’m not saying he was looking to use the blade. I am saying the blade is never the less etched in my memory. Eventually he brings me over to the chair, seats its me down, and proceeds to ask me three stated questions- why did you leavel (I didn’t hear you), why did you cheat (no immediate answer to that one), and why is your writing so messy (in my head i blamed that fact on the visible discrepency in size between my opposable thumbs, but before that could be verbalized he had opened my binder and tossed all of my work on the ground, instructing me to now “pick it up.”)

Eventually I got around to answering that second question, because in a move both meant to clean up my writing and get me thinking about what I had done, I had to write a one page (it might have been more, I can’t remember), essay about why I had done what I did. The theme of my essay- I just wanted to belong. Which, to throw this teacher a bit of grace, did eventually evoke a bit of empathy after his anger had susbsided. And in fact, what I wrote was absolutely true. What was equally true however is that over the ensuing year I would spend very little time worrying about trying to find a way in to those established circles. As that later event in the gym would prove, it was easier being relatively unnoticeable.

A few of my classmates ended up following me to another private school (M.B.C.I.) after we graduated from Grade 9, including the aforementioned fearless leader from the gym incident. If one thing was different this time around however, it was that I managed to carve out space with a couple other isolated “misfits” (I don’t think they would mind me using that word), whom gave me a pathway and a means to survive through to graduation. I use misfit because I maintain that we had to be one of the oddest cohorts and peer groups in the history of high school anywhere. 

And it’s worth mentioning, while that Grade 9 iincident was never acknowledged, I was even gifted a  brief moment of redemption by my grade 12 year:

In an effort to humiliate me in front of our new class at our new school, that same classmate (ya, that one) anointed me with a nickname- c-man. It was in an effort to use my last name to mark me with this innuendo going forward.

What he meant for evil…

Turns out that nickname stuck. Not only did it stick, it became part of the common rhetoric, even legendary. The problem is, at least for him and his intentions, no one knew who I was. They did come to know the nickname however. So much so that in my Grade 12 year a mock campaign for school president marketed as “C-Man for president” made it’s way into the ethos, and eventually even won the majority (non-qualifying) vote. I couldn’t occupy the position as I, or the name, was not officially in the running, but it did capture the attention of the school back in 1994. I still remember walking down the hallways and hearing people talk about C-Man without recognizing the mythic persona standing in front of them. I won’t lie, it gave me a small feeling of pride as I eventually said goodbye to those years of my life. Somehow it felt poetic.

Actually, there was another small moment of redemption. As mentioned between grade 10 and grade 12 I had formulated a relationship with what just might be the oddest peer groups in high school history. There was me, the socially awkward, skinny, long haired, ripped jeans, christian t-shirt wearing anomaly. There was John, whom towered over everyone else in the school, including the teachers (there’s some fun stories there). There was Jeremy, the smallest guy in the entire school (who also rarely spoke). When I say smallest, we are talking more than three feet difference between  him and John, or even him and me. There was Randy, a blind guy with a stutter. And lastly the couple of proper church boys whom floated in and out of the mix depending on the day.

On this particular day we were sitting around the lunch room between classes. The aformentioned guy in question was sitting a table over. At some point the guy in question started a random pissing contest by entering into a wrestling match with one of his cohorts. I’m not sure if it was the years of pent of frustration, a momentary lack of good judgment, or something else entirely, but something in me suddenly snapped, leading me to lose all sense of my better judgment. Before I knew it I was up out of my seat and promptly throwing myself into both of them from behind. Now there I was, both of them on the ground and me trying to process what had just happened. Or more directlly- what the (fill in the blank) did I just do.

That’s when he (ya, that one) gets up, and I can see in his eyes an otherworldly fury. He comes at me, I start running. On a normal day I could outrun him, but on this day he was operating on overdrive. At some point I realize he’s not going to stop, so I give in to the moment. I stop, and I let him catch me. Suddenly I find myself being whipped around into a locker with such sudden force that I could no longer breathe. Again, those eyes. He’s clearly not himself (and his usual self was bad enough in this case). He then drags me behind the lockers, and we stand there for a moment. To this day I am confident that, in that state, he would have left me with life long injuries, if not genuinely and possibly done even worse. The single up-close witness to this event backs up this intuitiion and observation-

Out of nowhere, I suddenly find myself being picked up off the ground (again). This time it was my friend John. He had followed us behind the lockers and now, in one fell swoop, had me in one hand and Jason in the other, holding us apart. Having created this space inbetween us,  he now stepped into it and just stood there. The other guy knew he had no leverage in this moment, and eventually he turns and walks away.

It is worth stating that this was nearing the end of our days at that school. While I did my best to choose my paths carefully from that day forward, he never came at me again. I am fairly sure it was because he feared the giant standing in-between. This was the year where my cohort and I, perhaps in another superb lack of good judgment, eventually burned our textbooks in the locker room inside a garbage can, effectively filling the place with smoke, setting off the alarm, and evacuating the premises. I guess you need a claim to fame somewhere, although in this case the only people who knew who the culprits were was us.

With all this focus on school, as I indicated above my years at Morningmeade had anoather life, so to speak. A life outside of those school walls. Much of that revolved around the mutual bond us three brothers shared with this kid across the street named Nathan. He would eventually relocate out of Winnipeg after we moved further north, but the bulk of the years in this home were spent wasting the evenings and long summer days biking to the nearby park where they had a bowl for us to risk our lives doing tricks on- in reality I was terrible, but in my mind, riding that wall felt akin to flying- and generally doing the things young boys did back then to earn scrapes, bruises, chipped teeth, bleeding heads. The stuff of childhood lore.

Although, looking back now makes this feel a little immature for our age (albeit it is something I am happy to embrace), we were also quite obsessed with creating forts and play acting, either in our basement or by carting the stuff from our basement on to our front yard. One go to formation on the front lawn was a train, where we would re-enact a full service ride on our way to whereever our imaginations wanted to take us. In the basement, the common narrative was running away from home on a raft, which always involved an entertaining chase from the invisible ghosts of our absentee parents (whom spent their time chatting upstairs over coffee/tea and cookies).

If it is true that we are ultimately shaped and formed by the stuff of our childhoods, I often wonder how this translates to lives spent chase those memories down. The ways we make sense of our later lives over or against or in conversation with that formative space. How it is that the ways we learn and grow in the face of our later experiences are given these certain paramaters to exist within- as in, who we “be”- come, or come to “be,” can only ever truly know that from which we come or are born from. This thought pushes further into the reality of how this works- what we come or are born from is always and forever preserved through memory. All of this is an act of living memory.

In a sense this means we are always looking backwards in order to recontexuatlize what we know into our present. The present is always the act of making the past known. Whatever conversations this creates between these two inter-relating parts of ourselves, that’s the stuff of our life. Thus, in stories like this, for as small as these revealed moments captured in my memory are, they are never-the-less the spaces where I find myself. Find my story. My present. The patterns that make sense of continued shaping of this conversation through the continued mapping out of my own meandering past. 

No story is inconsequential in this light. It all plays a role. And for those memories that remain more stubbornly persistant in your consciousness, more ready to lay claim to that uncovering trajectory, those are the threads you need to pay most attention to. In fact, as I am discovering in this process of attemting to tell my story in this way, these are usually the places that require you pause, sit, and dive even deeper. As it will become clear to me later in life, often times those parts of our selves that feel so frustratingly allusive inevitably find their way down that rabbit hole to a clarifying root. And if this doesn’t necessarily change those paramaters by which I can know myself, and come to be myself, sometimes that knowing can at least help locate where you are. in the plotline.

I wrote and reflected on my experience with Rowan William’s Discovering Christianity: A Guide For the Curious, Henry Cloud’s Why I Believe: A Psychologist’s Thoughts on Suffering, Miracles, Science, and Faith, and Christopher Beha’s Why I Am Not An Atheist here. Thus I figured I would focus on my other reads in this end of the month reflection:

In looking back on my reading journey through the month of March, it feels like a great place to begin, or to summarize, that journey is with Hwang Bo-Reum’s quirky, niche but fantastic Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books. Whether Bo-Reum’s walk through the why and how of her reading life would make sense to those for whom reading is not a lifestyle or obsession it’s difficult to know, but as someone who belongs in that camp this was very much an exercise in the art of being seen and understood. Only someone like that can truly get those quirky habits that we use and abuse in order to keep the fires burning.

Which is interesting too, because Bo-Reum is someone who sees the world very differently than I do and with who has had very different experiences when it comes to the shared reads that do surface over the course of the book. In many ways that’s the point though. It would be difficult to make it through Every Day I Read without encountering one of it’s dominant themes- reading together across our differences.

Or reading in conversation.

In terms of the why, Bo-Reum reminded me as well that we read not simply to understand the world, but to know the world. This is the power of story. Martin Shaw unpacks something of the same conviction in his addictive and captivating 2026 release, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Although this could add into that mix the stories we “hear.” Thinking back to January and my encounter with Kaitlin Curtice’s Everything Is a Story, Shaw likewise argues much the same thing- we know the world through narrative, precisely because the world takes a narrative shape. The narratives we tell and the narratives we live connect us to the narratives that hold this world together. This is the shape both the world and our lives take, which we can call myth. However, a big part of Shaw’s thesis is that we’ve lost the art and definition of myth-telling. Modernism has diluted it, reduced it to it’s own superficially applied dichotomies regarding what is real and what is not. Here myths no longer afford us a window into the truth of things, but rather flutter around like empty metaphors without an anchor.

The solution? Liturgy. The way to reclaim myth proper is to understand the basic human need for liturgical practice. This is what frames the narratives of the world and our lives as a matter of participation.

For me, I allign with participationist philosophy/theology. A leading voice in this area is Susan Grove Eastman, someone whom I know from her work in Romans and Paul, but remained woefully under-read when it came to her body of work Thus I finally checked off the essential Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology, a book that uses the language (our modern language) of our present scientific age as a way of fleshing out Paul in his own world. She is not modernizing Paul, rather she recognizes that as products of our own place and time (all of us), we have a particular language. Thus there are two in-roads into reading someone like Paul within his own language (place and time)- study and learn his language, or explain it and flesh it out using our own. In many ways these two actions go together, which is what Eastman is so good at balancing. As a scholar she specializes in research and knowledge of Paul’s world, but one of the things that sets her apart is her desire to apply this scholarship to a proper communication with our own world and our own language. To ask who Paul was in his world is to equally ask why and how it matters to our own. And that requires giving people the necessary tools to have that conversation.

What flows from this is the notion that in Paul’s anthropology all things exist in relationship, and that personhood then, bound as it is to the difficult subject of transformation, can only be undertood within the arena of this web of relationships. And not just between persons, but between the multi-faceted narratives that shape the world at large. For Paul, as Eastman argues, we cannot reduce discussions of personhood to neat and tidy portraits of individuals and our measures of morality, which is the stuff that allows our constrcuted societies to persist in the face of chaos. For Paul, his anthropology belongs to the cosmic story, the cosmic narrative in which we find the co-existing forces of this world, life and death, representing the story’s essential tension. Paul calls this, in the language of his world, the co-existing Powers or realities, one defined by Sin and Death and the other Christ. What Eastman helps articulate is how this way of seeing the world fits with our own language of personhood within the realms of cosmology and biology and neuro-science. By using this language to describe Paul’s world, it becomes possible to see how these narratives in fact do share an essential ethos across this cultural divide when it comes to how we experience this world.

More important however, is the simple observation that to truly know this story, regardless of our language, it requires participation in this cosmic narrative.

Here’s where things get really interesting though, as even where we partcipate in the same world and the same story, it nevertheless remains equally true, as it was for Paul in his own day, that we attach this cosmic narrative to different named conceptions of that observed and experienced tension. I’m thinking of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, a book I read this month in preparation for the release of the film adpatation. Weir, a confessing Positivist, writes a story that takes that narrative and it’s tensions and interprets it through the lens of his particular materialist framework. It’s a reminder of how part of the inevitable dance (interesting to note here how the film adapation imagines Weir’s story as a dance- see the recent filmspotting podcast espide/review for a great assessment of this idea) when it comes to the “everything is a story” mantra, or the notion that we are all shaped and made by our myths, is the simple fact that our shared narratives can express themselves through very different stories. Stories that bear the weight of the why questions, and which contront us with the reality of natural and logical implications. 

In Weir’s case, he imagines the observed tensions of the cosmic narrative, embodied as it is through this apocalytpic imagination and scenario, as the dueling forces of the enlightenment view of human progress versus the old order of natures’s cruel indifference. This is not an interpretation I personally adhere to, but it does function as a compelling reminder of how it is that our myths shape and form us in particular ways. I could also throw in my experience with the book Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Wendy Suzuki as well. As someone with a life long struggle with anxiety (or an anxiety disorder), it struck me once again how we can observe and experience the same thing in so many ways, rooted in the same narrative and the same tensions, and yet weave very different stories from it. If Weir’s Positivist allegiances undergird his own mythic shape, Suzuki takes a slightly different variant of that road by reducing those tensions to the incongruencies that persist between modern progress and the old brain. This becomes the grounds, set against a modern epidemic of anxiety disorders, for tricking and manipulating an old brain to see the new world progress has handed us through that old world lens. If once we needed anxiety to protect against old world threats, it is now run amuck in a world where percievably such threats have been long eradicated, leaving our brains to create threats out of everything. Thus, this becomes the story she tells about this shared coscmic reality and its tensions.

In the same way, although occupying completely different genres, the buzzy Theo of Golden by Allen Levi is a book that finds it’s way into the shared narrative and tensions by moving from the simplicty of it’s particulars (a stranger comes to a town and begins to converse with people on a bench in a park, beckoning us towards unpacking the mystery of who and what this stranger is) up into the cosmic (unlike Weir’s taking the cosmic and fleshing it out in the particularities of the mechanicistic expressions of its science). As such it tells a much different kind of story, one that sees this relationship between those two interconnected perspectives as being a window into meaning and responsiveness amidst the tensions.

Catherine Conybeare’s 2025 liberative and revealing book, Augustine the African, becomes an equally interesting example of this same exercise. Conybeare isn’t the first to broach the subject of Augustine’s long buried African roots and language in the soil of the West’s Protestant interests (see Thomas Oden), but, at least in my estimation, she is the first to give it such a robust examination in light of a biographical take on Augustine’s life as a whole. As someone who has a complicated relationship with Protestantism and the West, I found myself equal parts frustrated with the ways in which my upbringing weaved a very different story of this engimantic and important figure than one might find from his historical context, and as well thrilled to be confronted by someone who was complex and flawed and mired in his own polemics and conflicts and tensions. Especially when it came to his own troubled relationship with his African roots. In many ways this sheds a whole new light on what was a tortured soul. One thing that I really connected with was Augustine’s innate awareness of the tensions this world represents. He was someone who was haunted by the why quesions, and whom refused to engage any converation or relationship on superficial grounds. Every conversation for him bore the weight of the world and the implications of it’s competing stories. I felt a little less alone in this regard, even as Augustine’s growing isolation was also a trigger.

On an even more nerdy level, there was surprising overlap too with the book This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong by Mark Cooper-Jones. As someone who identifies as a maphead (thanks Ken Jennings, for giving us a name), I am always searching for new books about maps- the quirkier the better. I read this in tandem with  The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress, a book I haven’t yet finished, but in Mark Cooper-Jones’ super fun and very British romp through different historical moments shaped directly by their maps (a shout out to the audio form in all of its wonderful irreverance), they give example after example of how the stories we tell, defined as they are against our shared narratives, can hand us very different worldviews, all with a whole array of implications reaching from the particulars of a context to the cosmic portrait. The creation of maps are in many ways a great analogy for how the whole of life works, and if you have never considered how behind every point of view lies a map that has given it life and context, this is an easy and accessible and entertaining option for entering into that conversation.

Speaking of maps (sort of), my token traelogue for the month (I try to read at last one) was Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir. More specifically, a walking memoir of his “transformative 300-mile walk along Japan’s ancient pilgrimage routes.” Here, this specific journey through a landscape left forgotten and declining and disappearing against the face of progress, leads the writer to reflect on his own past history in a similarly fading American town, a past long buried by his relocation to Japan, using these images to illuminate the shape of history as it tells of both the natural and human experience of tme and experience. In time things become other things, but in doing so this simple fact throws our stories into question. It creates this tension and then wonders about the meaning of it all.

I actually started a different book initially, titled On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor, but abandoned it after finding his particular “story” to be less than charitable with the world he was assessing and interpreting. Mod on the other hand steps into a world marked by a noted syncretism, with a keen mix of irreverance and respect and curiousity. He doesn’t mute or reduce the necessary conversation between the cosmic and the particular, he steps straight into it, leading to laugh out loud and joy filled moments and challenging and heartbreaking realities Any voice that can connect “poo tag” with our wrestling with the gods with a straight face is worth a read.

From the big picture cosmic narrative (the ciruclar nature of the letter’s sunroom ponderings and reflections in The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God by N.T. Wright) to the particulars of a given time and place (a biting assessment of the relationship between Christian and Secular education in our modern landscape in Of Prophets, Priests, and Poets: Christian Formation at the Gates of Hell by Brian J. Walsh), my reading journey in March has reminded me that the liturgies of the wild, so to speak, cry out for our participation. Sometimes the most intuitive and aware way into reclaiming the power of myth to this end is the children’s story. There is something about the simplicity of this form that helps reawaken wonder within the complicated grown up spaces. To this end, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy was a powerful reminder that this matters, therefore you matter, leading us as readers to consider that the reason  we tell better narratives of ourselves is so that we can adequately tell better narratives of the world. And also the 2026 release of The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan by Jasmine Warga, proved to be a wonderful throwback to the classic tales of a bygone era, following the simple story of a cheetah and a dog in a way that poses profound questions about loss, belonging, fear and (found) family.

Lastly, although not technically a children’s book, it certainly could be treated as such, and wouldn’t be out of place at all alongside Beatrice Potter, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton breaks open the boundaries of the memoir and reimagines it’s possibilities through the unexpected relationship betweeen a struggling woman bearing the pressures of modern life as a big city professional and a baby hare, bred from the natural and wild spaces and in need of her help. As would be expected, it turns out the “help” is more of a reciprocal need in this case, and Dalton uses this simple and affecting bond between two unlikely “lives” to quietly delve into the more cosmically aware tensions that life and death (or the Powers) present.

“I don’t know what faith means anymore.”

This is how the conversation begins in the new book, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman.

The words come from Wiman, posing a statment (as a question) to Volf based on the following observation:

“I fear those big words- faith, grace, sin, redemption, love- which make us so sad.”

The sadness comes from how slippery these words are. He describes them as demanding our attention, but also impossible to pin down. Even at times (or most of the time) outright and maddingly allusive and stubbornly deceptive.

In response, Volf reflects on how, regardless of where we find ourselves, making sense of what we believe forces us to contend with the big words that give that belief it’s shape and character. When it comes to matters of worldview, they are the only way into a conversation about life, about the shape of this world. This is not something any of us can escape. Rather, we must wrestle with it. On that front, Volf makes a striking concession;

“As I have aged I have come to believe that my faith matters much less than I thought it did when I was younger.”

By this he means it is actually about God’s faith in us. Or in other words, it is actually about what our worldview, God or otherwise, says about us and about this world, this reality that we occupy. The root of despair in this sense then, is in fact the notion of a disinterested world, which also consequently lies at the root of all doubt and all cynicism. Even simple recognition of this truth matters, because the fruit is then the free embrace of an essential mystery. The same mystery we find ourselves lost in, even as it gives us life. This is true even if that lostness leaves us feeling like we are at arms length from that thing we might call Truth (or Life).

Or to be more stated and forward- that thing we might call Love.

Volf goes on to state something even more striking:

“God is the biggest of the big words.”

It’s in this sense that however big these words might be, words that are necessarily mired in the messiness of our human endeavors, our systems and our relationships, all such words play a part in getting at what we mean by God. All such words matter precisely because they are seeking to understand reality as it is. In this way, to simply say “I believe in God,” or to say “I don’t believe in God,” is never enough. God isn’t something we add in to the equation, as though it is another thing that exists alonside other “things.” To state that God exists is to beg the greater questions concerning the nature of Reality itself. What does this word mean is a quesiton that more aptly applies to one’s concern for uncovering the true nature and shape of this Reality. This is precisely why the real work happens when we dig underneath and begin to wrestle with all of the big words that can help us to flesh this out against our questions and our wrestlings with the mystery. 

However daunting it might be to ask, what precisely do I mean by God, it is in fact our willingness to ask, what do I mean by faith (as an example of one of those big words) that becomes the necessary window into our awareness of whatever it is we are accepting and rejecting.

Here he brings an important concern regarding our wrestling to the surface, which is simply this- are these big words creating big and spacious places or are they handing us narrowed and restrictive views of this world? Here is where we can begin to understand an essential truism of our humanity- any loss of meaning is usually tied to the baggage that we carry forward from our lived lives, and it is precisely that very same thing that pushes us to disengage from the hard work of fleshing out what these words mean. We disengage  in order to protect against that aforementioned sadness. This, it could be said, is where we trade meaning for dogmatism. As Wiman goes on to say in a responsive letter, citing Abraham Joshua Heschel,

One of the fatal errors of conceptual theology has been the seperation of the acts of religious existence from the statements about it. Ideas of faith must not be studied in total seperation from the moments of faith.”

In other words, faith is a participatory word, as all words are. To know what this word means is to participate in the world that they compel us towards. As Wiman says, “To conceive of God without the world and without human perceptions is not only impossible but, in much theology, actively destructive.” Here he surmises once againt that “exist may be too strong a word to use (even) for an electron. I take God’s existence to be much the same, though for God “exist” is too weak a word.”

In attempting to flesh this out further, Volf wonders in response about the basic idea that everything we do, all motives, goals and strivings, whatever good we might find in such things, are also necessarily nonbeneficent. “Always partly harming both others and my own self.” Good, bad, beauty, ugliness, Volf suggests that it’s impossible for human agency to clearly note where exactly one ends and the other begins. Author Grace Hamman states something similar in her book Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, noting how viritue contains this puzzling quality in which we seek them for the good that they can reveal and make known in this world and in our lives, and yet they are always situated in lockstep with vice.

This is the paradox of participation. And if it is true that all things exist in relationship, this is also why participation requires something external to itself to participate in. To say all things exist in relationship isn’t to say two things therefore exist, it is to say that this thing we call relationship exists. It is a transcendent reality by its nature, one that is revealed through a life of participation, but which similtanousely reveals the one who is participating in this world. Or one could say, Reality is, by it’s nature, relational. And in the terms of this book, participation can then be said to be drawn by the glimmerings that this existant (and extant) relationally defined capital “R” Reality reflects into the world. Glimmerings of something true, of something we would then call and determine to be sacred.

As Volf inisists, this is something that cannot be a matter of our own creation. It cannot be something that our desperate attempts to conjure it into awareness or to locate it by way of proofs or our constructed systems, can conjure and capture in and of itself. Any such “God,” or any such capital “R” Reality, indeed could never logically exist in such terms. Rather, what we seek is the same thing we all desire-Truth. And the closer this Truth is aligned with the lived-in spaces of our lives, the more important and the more meaningful those big words become.

I’m only partly through the first section of the book, and it has been captivating my imagination. In fact, it’s been the perfect compliment to three other books that have been walking with me on my journey through the month of March, bringing to light some of the questions they have been inspiring me to ask for myself. Namely, why do I believe in God, and more importantly how precisely do I define and grapple with the biggest word of all.

The first of these books was the 2025 release Why I Believe: A Psychologist’s Thoughts on Suffering, Miracles, Science, and Faith by Henry Cloud. I imagine that anyone who grew up in the world of evangelical Chrisianity in the 80’s and 90’s will know this name. I confess, for me it was a blast from the past, as the last time I heard this name was nearly 25 years ago. Thus I was deeply curious to see, what is essentially his own reckoning with the past 50 years of his life and work, what this book might conjure up for me as someone who’s own journey led him out of that once familiar world.

What was fascinating to me was the way Cloud structures the book. The latter half becomes a greatest hits of the well tread apologetics that run rampant through evangelicalism. I’ve come to be less and less a fan of these arguments over the years (and consequently less a fan of the atheism that stands as its central sparring partner). But before getting to any of these classic “arguments” for the faith, he blankets the first half of the book with story after story of “supernatural” or spiritual experiences. Stories that become windows into more and more stories. Stories that, if one wanted to be truly rational, you can’t just turn away from and dismiss. Stories with tangible, identifiable, and verifiable, components in the scope of their recounting for those who stand in proximity to them. Stories that contain the common markers of convictions born not from “I can’t explain this by science, therefore God.” but rather the deep insistance that “this important thing happened, and I must attend for it.”

Which sparked this thought in me. It feels true to me to say that, at a base level my experience and observation of this world reveals a Reality where such stories are both common and widespread through history and across the world. What is also true though is that these stories are also largely defined in ways that don’t really fit with common wholesale dismisives like “in your head” or “cultural influence,” or “superstition,” or “fear of death.” 

This is what I have found to be the case on my own journey. There is a whole world of acedemia and popular level authors that once saturated my point of view, from the likes of Erhman to Pinker and Harris and the many grassroots level scholars upon who’s work these popular level personas are pulling from, which have all manners of ways, often rhetorical, of keeping the universal witness to these stories out of view and out of the discussion. To do so however requires us to make irrational leaps in our reasoning. To pull from convenient dismissives, usually rooted in the also very real array of questionable stories and experiences that we find littering the mix.

The simple truth for me though is, given the nature what these stories are outside of the potentially corrupted forms, narratives that do not attend for this nature and choose not to take the stories seriously based on wholesale dismissives, stories that the people involved (including Cloud) would have direct proximity to, do not feel compelling. They would need to posit, to use Cloud’s book as an example, that he and those wihtin the book are actively making these details up. The stories however do not exhibit this quality. Not only that, but to attempt to diqualify them on that basis brings up a whole other slate of issues that are even more problematic. And it should be said here, this isn’t isolated to Cloud’s stories. This is something I have found to be largely true across comparitive religions and spiritual beliefs.

Now, I know firsthand how easy it is to be convinced that this is not the case, even to the point of ignoring and dismissing the stories I have direct proximity to in my own life. When I am angry at Christianity, hurt and betrayed and disillusioned by deceptions, the anti-religious stance, or the even the softened agnostic-atheist that sometimes emerges when that battle gets tired, is both affirming and energizing, even in its admitted isolation. Which is also why it should be said, regardless of what I am saying above, it still won’t (and shouldn’t, and can’t) function as a so called “proof” argument. Anything can be explained away. Rather, what this is, in my eyes, is good reason to take it seriously when I found myself being forced to examine my biases, to look again with a fresh set of eyes at the evidence my observation and experience of this world was presenting to me on my journey.

However, if what I say above is true, and these experiences take on a shape and form that we have to take seriously in order to be truly rational about what they are, what remains equally the case is that this reality also reveals a world where such stories and experiences capture very real differences in ones beliefs, ones theologies, ones grappling with and defining of those big words. Meaning, if these experiences appear to be universally true as a witness with a particular shape and form, what different people and different cultures conclude from them represents a collision corse of seeming contradictions. Including, of course, when it comes to the biggest word of all.

But here’s the thing. This isn’t so much a problem for the biggest word. Logically speaking, Reality must exist regardless of our knowledge of it. And if we are to make a subsequent move, which we all do, in working to give this word definition and thus meaning, the simple facts of these stories are compelling enough in their own right to, at the very least, suggests we can’t simply look away and pretend as though they aren’t there. Not if we seek to be rational creatures. Rather, the fact that these things exist and yet we also find all of these vast disagreements in our conclusions becomes a point in which we can then engage the necessary wrestling. It is where one can say with Winan, I don’t know what faith means anymore, and yet I also know I need that word. Why does this matter? Because it’s the only way to begin to attend for these differences. For me that’s what I find compelling. In this case, as an example, it prevents me from simply dismissing Cloud’s book as a reflection of a world I no longer agree with, as a collection of theologies I might be tempted to simply roll my eyes at or remain cynical towards. It is the stories, the very stories he spends half his book with as a starting point, that determines the shape of the Reality we are both wrestling with in our own ways. If this is the case, there is freedom to disagree about how we define the big words lying underneath.

The second book was Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious by Rowan Williams. A very different experience, in that by and large Williams would sit slightly closer to some of my own grapplings with those big words, coming from the world of Eastern Orthodoxy.

As oppposed to engaging apologetics, William’s steers around both Cloud’s emphasis on the stories of people and his subsequent arguments for faith, instead seeking an emphais on the nature of the mystery itself, on the wrestling as a compelling aspect of our participation and, for him, the God he finds it reveals within the realm of history and Tradition.

Here he demonstrates his own strengths and weaknesses, and at times I think he santizes some of the important dynamics of the larger discussion a bit too much, in moments out of necessity perhaps, at other times out of leariness of other approaches he remains cycnical towards (as do I). I suppose one way to describe his book is to say, rather than ask whether these things might provide the curious with proofs for God, instead he seeks to explore whether the whole thing we call Christianity can make sense simply as as a story in and of itself. Does it give life clarity or not. It’s a fair and important question, and for me, one I find interesting on my own journey of discovery. The more distance I get from the world of evangelical Christianity, the more I find myself coming back to one of it’s more classic arguments, albeit one which sits just outside of the common apologetic form within the modernism that dominates much of that Christian framework- that of the argument from desire. Something that Williams does an excellent job of unpacking in his own way in his book Passions of the Soul.

Here I find myself leaning into it’s more recent rennasainace, arguably one that seems to be breaking open the boundaries of it’s early seeded forms. At it’s root, the argument from desire, which is closely related to theologies of the imagination, or even something like John O’ Donahue’s argument from Beauty (in his book Beauty, one of my all time favorites), is intuitively and intentionally interested in making sense of the way we live our lives. Try as it might, the old modernist allegaiances to material explanations, however out of fashion they are coming to be even in the most skeptical of secularist circles, might be able to hand us information, but it meets a wall when it comes to epxlaining the broader realm of the liaving, to borrow a phrase from the book The Sacred and the Profane.

The third book, 2026’s Why I am Not an Atheist by Christopher R Beha, is in my opinion the best of the three, partly because a big element of my own journey is my interest in the philosophical grounds for belief. I am someone given to the abstract rather than the concrete, perpetually restless when it comes to seeking out the why rather than the what. And Beha, whether you believe in God or not, offers an incredibly impressive summary of that philosphical history, moving to weave it into his own journey from a time of being formed by Bertland Russell to discovery of a world that begins to take on a different shape through the minds and eyes of the great philosophers. 

If my movement towards belief in God is anchored first in my observations about the nature of this Reality we occupy (and share), which is both relational in its quality and defined by a witness to widespread and definable experiences in a way that does not fit the parameters of materialist worldviews, and secondly attending for the way we live our lives within the shape of this Reality, with the subject of desire being one of the most compelling dynamics of the realm of the living, the third would be the power of philosophy to move us from the what to the why. Not all philsoophy, in it’s expression, moves towards belief in God, at least in the sense of reudcing such a question to a matter of “existence,” but I do think all philosophy is actively trying to fill in a gap that both the lived life and the observed nature of this Reality demands we attend for. I have a deep affinity for Kierkegaard in particular (see Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, or Either/Or), but in truth I have not found a coherent philosophical argument that isn’t pulling from the logic that necessarily presses against the restraints of rationalism. When it comes down to it, for me it is Logic that most often gets missed and ignored in views that seek to punt matters of “God,” taken in the way I argue for above, to the side. And to dial that down even further, it is the logical implications of given arguments that tend to be most ignored above all. It is in this sense I have come to believe that there are only two essential Realities sitting in conversation- a truly materilaist worldview, and everything else (see David Bentley Hart’s magesterial All Things Are Full of God’s). Or at least these are the onwo views that I think can be argued for with a sense of logical coherency,. But here ihe thing- this is only the case when we are willing to contend for the logical implications of either or of these views.

I could say much more, but this was an attempt to dial things down to a kind of root of my belief. I could speak to why and how I arrive at the particularities of belief in the Christian narrative, but that would in many ways be a secondary argument that flows from the biggest question. Not isolated, and certainly inter-dependent, but nevertheless it’s own set of questions and wrestlings. For the time being, this is what I find in the glimmerings of this world, even where I am inclined to resist it on my best days.

Watching, conversing and writing about film has been a hobby of mine for a long while. Ever since I first graced the screens, which was a re-release of Lady and the Tramp back in the 80’s, I have been drawn to the allure of this mode of storytelling. This unique artform.

Over the years this has taken on different shapes and identities, notably when discourse started to shift towards online film communities, in an age where suddenly everyone was becoming a film critic. Which of course led to it’s own sort of hiearchal devleopments via blogspaces and sites and named brands and subscriber based identities.

One thing I have noted about this breave new world full of “film critics” is the tendency for many of these voices to exhbiit a deep felt need to capture and preserve the unique or original and subsequently unbiased thought. To pen a review amongst the endless many that can emerge from outside of the larger conversation. To write their thoughts apart from reading any other reviews, ratings, or trailers. This is something I see represented a lot in the online sphere, to the point where it has become a virtue.

I don’t have the same skills or presence as many of these writers. My hobby has seen my participation ebb and flow through different communities, but always as a participant. I do however spend a lot of time writing, thinking, reflecting when it comes to film. And on that front there are two distinct ways in which I tend to operate differently from others. First, I write mainly about the conversations I am seeing and hearing. I am not concerned about bias’ or having my thoughts stand on their own. I am primarily concerned with capturing and observing and reflecting on the larger conversations and what that says.

Second, if someone has taken the time to write their thoughts, I genuinely take the time to read them. I have a number of people I follow, all people who also do this as a hobby, and it is a value of mine, even if they never know it or realize it, to invest my time in reading what they have to say. And whenever I am speaking about a film, pondering a film, it is always in relationship to the larger conversation that flows from that. Rather than seek that pure, unbiased thought, what I write is interacting with that collective experience.

Which brings me to the topic at hand- the buzzy new film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. A movie that has been in the headlines for a good while now prior to its wide release this weekend (March 19th), utilizing a slow rollout featuring multiple early screenings, which subsequently drummed up some exceptional buzz. Maybe too much, as the allusion to perfection is a hard expectation to live up to, but neverthless proving not to be a deterant at the box office thus far, given an 80 million domestic opening and an added 60 million globally (for a $140 million opening weekend).

What makes Project Hail Mary a bit unique is the fact that it is an Amazon-MGM film, being recognized as their first legitimate box office hit, and it just happens to be an original film. This comes at a time when the WB merger has been the key topic of conversation, especially when it comes to the relationship between streamer and theatrical. Once you bring in Universal’s recent announcement about doubling down on their commitment to theaters (setting aside their contract with Netflix), this can be seen as good news.

I do want to be clear, however. Any time we are talking about an “event” type movie, original or not, we must also be asking the question of how this is contributing to the whole. In a healthy theatrical environment, the success of Project Hail Mary (and given how things tend to go with headlines these days, it’s $200 million dollar budget could be the click-bait articles need to be talking about how it’s a box office failure next week) is marked by the success of (to throw a few current titles out for measure) the smaller budget Canadian films Undertone and Maya and Amar, the Korean indie The King’s Warden, the popular level horror film Ready or Not 2, the mid budget romance Reminders of Him, Stewarts debut The Chronology of Water, and original animated films GOAT and Hoppers.

There is another facet of this conversation surrounding Project Hail Mary that interests me however. In an age where it’s near impossible to know when and why a film is going to be successful (citing the old mantra “make good films and they will come” simply isn’t a consisent truism), it’s always worthwhile unpacking a cultural moment, which I think this film qualifies as. Sure, there’s the fact that the film’s source material has a significant following, aided by the arguable appearance of an adaptation that treats the source material with the respect certain auidiences might demand (relatively speaking of course)

I think there’s more lurking behind the surface though. It doesn’t take much perusing of the larger conversation to note a common motif in people’s reactions to this film. One word that seems to rise above the rest is “hopeful.” It’s a movie being released in the seemingly most dire of moments, paricularly in America but also on a global level, which dares to imagine that people are good and things are going to be alright. And in many respects it would seem people want that story right now. Perhaps need that story. 

It’s worth noting as well that this is not an accident. If you have listened to interviews with the author, who also serves as producer on the film, this is what he set out to do with the source material. Having previously written a story with an unlikeable protagonist that he describes as not being recieved well, he set out to craft a character readers could and would root for. Flawed yes, but only in a humanizing sense, not in a qualifying sense. You can see this in the repeated refrains that emerge within both book and film where the protagonist, who’s once potential of an illustrious career in the sciences has resulted in a modestly payed teaching role, struggles with his feelings of fear and self doubt even in the face of of other’s belief in him. It’s a feel good story through and through, giving people someone to root for. Someone who, in many respects, might remind us of ourselves.

The author, Andy Weir, is someone with a great interest in the sciences, even as he continues to direct that towards his creative works. When it comes to the stories he writes, he has spoken publicly about seeing the world from the perpsective of a positivist (defined as a philosophical system that rejects metephysical authority in favour of a sturdied empiracal rationionalism, and noted by it’s unwavering belief in the myth of progress, a narrative that upholds commitments to humanity’s goodness and it’s ability to control and bring about a better world). From this lens, his stories reflect a belief that we are presently in the best of all possible world’s given the relative placement within the historical timeline. Meaning, he appeals to those like Pinker whom argue that while people are naturally given to despair, when we look at our history we have never lived in a less violent, more prosperous time (not withstanding actually defining those terms).

How does this play out in Project Hail Mary? We have the everyman’s quirky quasi-hero who defies the odds by appealing to humanity’s greatest traits and bringing about hope for the future, all while being surrounded by people who believe fervently in this humanistic endeavor, and all in the name of humanity’s greatest achievement- science- of course.

In other words, the quintessential story of modernism. The enlightenment blueprint.

Here’s where I would throw my own observations into the mix. It doesn’t surpise me that this narrative is appealing to the masses. In many ways it could be argued that this prototype is appealing to one of storytelling’s greatest draws- nostalgia. Not unlike the recent Train Dreams, this is a story that on the surface seems to be and appears to be speaking to an imagined “better” future, but really what it is doing is pulling from that common mythic foundation that once promised us the greatest of all possible worlds made in our own image.

And, much lke Train Dreams, embedded in this is that subtle allegiance to America’s place as both the pinacale of this story and its preservation. As the feeling goes, when America loses it’s way, the world self destructs, at least from this point of view. Yes, there’s a bit of irony to the fact that Gosling has never looked or felt more Canadian on screen, but the fact that the hero of this story, surrounded by a global presence taking on a worldwide threat, is the token American. The fact that this same story could be told from any other national POV and have a different hero at it’s center might feel and seem obvious, but I would argue that it is something many nviewers have missed. And it matters to where we find the hope being represented in this film.

I read the book for the first time this past month in preparation for seeing the film. One of the things I noted in my review was my frustration with the fact that the book stays so firmly on the surface of it’s premise. Instead of using the science as a way to dig underneath the bigger questions regarding the motivations of it’s characters and the why of their actions and their struggles and the subsequent questions of meaning this evokes, it trades that for a heavy emphasis on expostion and, reduces it’s world to it’s mechanics, a world it can control and thus save. Very little (to no) time is spent actually fleshing out the necessary existential crisis (token positivist tendency by the way).

The movie in many ways corrects this. Where the book’s exposition overtook the narrative, here the characters themselves are brought to the forefront, filling in the gaps with an emotional intelligence instead of simply the head knowledge represented in the book. It’s a welcome change for me personally, and one that actually functions in a somewhat antiethical way to the arc in the novel, although given what I’ve found in much of the online discourse I think people are equally  unaware of the implications. For me this represents something of a curious cognitive disonnance.

This simple change in the arc stems from where we locate the central character’s growth and transformation. If the book imagines the hope stemming from the protagonist’s solving of the puzzle which is the physical laws in question (which coincidentally is described as having superior knowledge to the alien species that informs the relational component of the story, something which visually translates through a particular striking scene involving the American “teacher” for the subtle but glaring assumptions it does make), lingering in the subtext of the film is this quiet  concession that such knowledge alone isn’t enough to make sense of the state of the living world. Here we see a different “myth” breaking through the walls of it’s modernist rhetoric, leading the viewer to see the true hope in the narrative patterns driving the protagonist’s choices. These patterns express themselves in the language of sacrifice. More importantly though, such a myth is not rooted in the human accomplishment. Rather, it is a pattern that life, or the living, is responding to. It’s a story and reality that breaks in from the outside.

For me, the true revelation that Project Hail Mary “apocalypses” into our midst, which might actually be acting in spite of it’s own intentions, is not the glory of the human enterprise, it is not trusting in the myth of progress, it’s not the need to champion american exceptionalism, nor is it the materiliasm that undergirds the virtues of our species capacity to “survive” against all odds. The true revelation arrives as a message that actually critiques these things as being built on a false and wrong foundation. It gives allegiance to a different way of seeing, being and participating in the world. It reveals a pattern that makes sense not of how we survive or how we can control and master this physical world, but of how we respond to the counter-intuitive nature of the lived in world that we actually find. How we participate in it by way of patterns that can both name the problem and transform it according to a greater Truth.

What struck me walking out of the film, especially having spent some time immersed in that larger conversation, is that even where we are taught a different narrative through the systems of this world, this contrary pattern can’t help but emerge as it’s own voice of critique and redemption. Reminds me of Tolkien and Lewis’ approach to the True myth that makes sense of all the world’s stories. For them this is what compelled them ultimately towards the story of Christ. Somehow and in someway, this patterned way of living, this breaking in of the sacrificial narrative, put all the pieces in place for understanding the mythic shape of history itself. It gave them a way of understanding the Darknness and the Light, precisely because it makes sense of what we find in the realm of the living. It makes sense of what we resist, and what ultimately provides our way forwad out of the mess. That Christ plays this out on a cosmic level is simply the touchpoint of history’s own intuition.

If we see this as a story seeking to reclaim the forgotten allure of the Enlightenment narrative in a time of crisis, we will only be left chasing after this story’s repeated illusion. It might feel hopeful, but that hope can never be rooted in anything true. If we see this as that universal pattern breaking into our present, that hope suddenly has a Life of it’s own. It can genuinely say, despite the cycles of history bearing itself out in the throes our present moment, there are patterns pointing us to a greater Truth.